


Hex Life

by ForASecondThereWedWon



Series: Resting Glitch Face [5]
Category: WandaVision (TV)
Genre: Accidental Marriage, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Banter, Domestic, F/M, Fake Marriage, Flirting, Happy Ending, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Lust, Magic, Magical Pregnancy, Morning After, POV Alternating, Sexual Tension, Sharing a Bed, Smut, Strangers to Lovers, Telepathic Control Lite™, Unplanned Pregnancy, Vaginal Fingering, diverges from canon in episode: s01e04 We Interrupt This Program, making out to avoid being noticed is an Avengers-approved field tactic, sure you've seen a Darcy flirt but have you seen a Jimmy woo?, that's right - they're accidentally fake married
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-20
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-14 05:47:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 34,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29537745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ForASecondThereWedWon/pseuds/ForASecondThereWedWon
Summary: Guest starring Agent James E. Woo as himself and introducing Dr. Darcy Lewis as Mrs. Darcy Woo!Or: Darcy and Jimmy are sent into the Hex to retrieve Captain Monica Rambeau. Finding out Westview has cast them as a married couple is only the first of the surprises that await them.
Relationships: Darcy Lewis/Jimmy Woo
Series: Resting Glitch Face [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2121495
Comments: 385
Kudos: 341





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _This time tomorrow, what will we see?/Field full of houses, endless rows of crowded streets/I don't know where I'm going, I don't want to see_ \- "This Time Tomorrow," The Kinks

_Even Thanos couldn’t stop her._

That’s the whisper going around the base, blowing in through open doors and passed along by agents and scientists who cover the mouthpiece of their headsets while they gossip. They’re scared of her, but like everyone Darcy’s met anywhere supernatural hijinks are afoot, they won’t admit it in so many words.

Darcy, on the other hand, doesn’t mind admitting that she’s feeling a little trepidatious to be so close to a radioactive energy field next to the town that time forgot. Or at least the town that everybody who lives in the surrounding region seems to have forgotten. Actually, scratch all that because what it is, she finds as she does some preliminary analysis on the whole-ass sitcom she’s picked up, is the town that forgot _time_.

Alright, Darcy knows a little about this sort of shit. Other dimensions, other realms. Places where people dress like they’re posing for an urn and speak like this boy in her high school drama class who was obsessed with Shakespeare’s _Henry V_. Well, once more unto the fucking breach because Westview’s a neat little slice of small-town New Jersey except for the massive decade disparity between it and the rest of the world. Yesterday, Westview was stuck in the ’50s. Today, it’s the ’60s. Based on her readings, this isn’t some parallel-universe Westview-sized portal. It’s here, Earth, and there’s an Avenger right in the middle of this laugh-track nightmare. An Avenger that Thanos couldn’t stop.

She’s curious, really, how long Wanda Maximoff might’ve been able to hang out in there (or be trapped in there—there hasn’t been time to draw definitive conclusions) if the energy field hadn’t slurped Captain Monica Rambeau inside like a human noodle. When something freaky happens to one of their own, S.W.O.R.D. fucking mobilizes. That’s something Darcy’s learned in the few hours she’s been here, barely 12 hours total since she was recruited to apply the degree she got to study space and the pitfalls and possibilities it holds for the future of humankind. The _future_ , not beehives and articles on how to keep your husband happy.

Not that she wasn’t getting into _WandaVision_ , because she was, until she was recruited within her recruitment for an extra-special taskforce. She’s so muddled at this point that she might’ve volunteered. It’s been kind of a blur. There was definitely some shameless manipulation of the fact that Darcy idolizes Captain Rambeau. When the S.W.O.R.D. dude said he wanted her for the recovery team, she felt weirdly patriotic. She may have saluted.

Now, she’s walking outside next to Agent Woo. S.W.O.R.D. wouldn’t let her take her hat (her ears are cold, not that anyone cares), but she’s been equipped with a bulletproof vest under her coat. Agent Woo’s name and the fact that he works for the FBI are about the only things she’s had a chance to learn about him, and she only knows the second because he’s wearing a jacket that says so.

“So,” she says, shouting a little over the wind as she grabs at her hair, pulling it out of her face (and her mouth), “they’re sending us in to rescue Captain Rambeau because we’re the most qualified, right?”

Agent Woo shoots her a worried look.

“I’m pretty sure it’s because they consider us the most expendable.”

“Dammit. I mean, that’s pretty much what I figured, but couldn’t you have softened the blow a little, Agent Woo?”

“You can call me Jimmy, and you seem like someone who’d rather deal with the truth from the start, Dr. Lewis.”

“Darcy.”

They shake hands without halting.

Near the place where they’ve ascertained the edge of the anomaly to be, Director Hayward is waiting to send them off. Darcy wishes this were like a boat christening in either of the following ways: being hit hard with a bottle (preferably over the head, and waking up at home to find this was all a bad, strange dream), or being doused in expensive champagne. She really feels as though she could use a good swig of something before walking through that invisible wall. Even standing there, it’s like Westview is subtly repelling her, a tired host dropping hints for their last guest to head home.

“You feel it too, huh?” Jimmy asks.

Darcy swallows and nods.

Hayward feeds them a bunch of bullshit about how well they’ve been prepared for this. She frowns through it, only perking up when he starts rattling off the arrangements that have been made for her and Jimmy once they enter Westview.

A S.W.O.R.D. agent hacked public records to establish the two of them as Westview natives, returning from a trip out of town. They’ve been allotted everything from a narrow ranch house that’ll be their secret headquarters within the anomaly down to library cards. On paper— _literally_ on paper because they probably won’t see a computer for a while—they belong there. The townspeople seem to have accepted Monica Rambeau into their midst (though she’s been renamed for some reason), so the plan is basically to act like they’re supposed to be there.

It all goes back to the whispers, the implicit understanding that they can’t come at Wanda head-on. But if they play the game by the set rules, they can exist alongside her. With their fake identities “verified” inside that nonfiction sitcom, they should be able to slip into the background, not get slotted into speaking roles that force them to share scenes with the star. If the public consciousness is tied to the phenomenon the way S.W.O.R.D. is banking on, Darcy and Jimmy will be accepted as a teeny part of the larger narrative and be able to go in, find Monica, and get out. Of course, they don’t know _how_ they’re going to get out because they’ll be the first people to try it. Hayward leaves that reminder out of his speech.

While they hear about how they’ve been permitted to keep their modern clothes and Kevlar, Darcy reassures herself with the thought that this is just another odd little adventure. The possibility of all her clothes changing on their own when they enter the anomaly? Fun! The other possibility, that they’ll need to immediately risk their cover by stealing something period-appropriate? Well, there’s also something fun about the idea of casual, state-sanctioned theft! Adventure! Woohoo!

“…and good luck,” is Hayward’s limp conclusion.

“Thank you, sir,” Jimmy says.

“Yeah,” Darcy mumbles, “thanks a million.”

They glance at each other, then step forward. The Maximoff Anomaly welcomes two more human noodles to Westview.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A short first chapter, but they'll be progressively longer as things get quickly underway for Darcy and Jimmy! We'll be switching to Jimmy's POV next chapter and continuing to alternate every other chapter for the rest of the fic.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _Well, hey, little Hollywood/You’re gone but you’re not forgot/You got the cash but your credit’s no good/You flipped the script, you shot the plot_ \- "Sedona," Houndmouth

It was early afternoon when they left the base, but it’s night in here, and Jimmy doesn’t have his gun.

The second he and Dr. Lewis step through, he touches his hip. It’s supposed to help him orient himself. But there’s no gun. No badge either, just his hand brushing over the lightweight wool of a summer suit. Nice cut anyway, he thinks, admiring the long line of the jacket and following it down to the sharp crease of the trousers. He squints in the night and thinks the suit might be midnight blue (borrowed from the FBI jacket he was just wearing?), maybe charcoal, until he looks away from his body to realize _everything_ is shades of grey.

“Son of a biscuit,” he murmurs, staggered. This is the opposite of Dorothy landing in Oz and its world of colour.

“No fair. You had extra time to practice.”

Jimmy whirls to Darcy, who he shouldn’t have forgotten about because he needs to protect her with his… lack of gun. She doesn’t look like she’s worrying about that though, at least not yet. What she’s doing is tentatively patting her hair to determine its new silhouette. When they went in, it was long and curled, styled but not fussy. Now, it’s teased into a smooth mound atop her head with the ends all neatly tucked away at the back, as he sees when she turns to take in their nocturnal surroundings.

“To practice what?” Jimmy asks, instinctively shepherding her off the road and onto the grass, though he isn’t anticipating anyone else heading into Westview.

“Your retro lingo. I didn’t even think of that.”

“It’s not— This is just how I talk.”

“Huh.” She pauses a moment, appearing deep in thought.

He appraises their situation, the short trek to town, the possibility of being approached by citizens who’ll think they’re unsavoury characters, out after dark. He has no idea what time it’s supposed to be.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Darcy finally announces with clear articulation and forceful emphasis. She turns to him. “I don’t have the internal translator.”

“What?”

He’s hoping to make sense of this conversation at some point, but he really can’t keep up with whatever’s happening in her brain.

“You know how naturally the people here use outdated slang, right?”

“…Yeah.”

“Well, I didn’t know whether they were just really good at playing along with the—” She waves a hand towards the subdivision. “—production design or it was forced on them the same way this hairdo has been forced on me.”

“It’s cute,” Jimmy assures her.

“Really?”

“Have you ever seen _Hairspray_?” He closes his eyes for a moment and shakes his head. “Sorry, no, don’t answer that, finish your thought.”

“I was leaning towards _everyone’s being forced_ , but you’re a terrible test subject because you already speak like you’re in an old movie, and I can still swear. Arguably, that’s considered unladylike even today because men love to police women’s speech as one of our most powerful assets, but it’s definitely a no-no for female etiquette of the sixties. Thus, my words are my own.”

“You can’t call the way I talk old-fashioned and then say ‘thus.’”

“Apparently, I can do what I want because the Hex says so.”

“The Hex?”

Darcy gestures around them and he plans to ask her to explain that later, once they’re in a secure location.

“Why do you think it’s not affecting us?” he asks instead.

“Because we’re stowaways whose heads Wanda hasn’t infiltrated yet? Because we came here willingly, foregoing the need for a hostile brain takeover? Or maybe it _is_ affecting us and we’re just being influenced less strongly because of one of those other reasons. I don’t know, dude. I say let’s congratulate ourselves on our good luck and lay low.”

Jimmy glances around again.

“We should probably skedaddle, if you’re ready.”

She points at him.

“‘Skedaddle,’” she repeats.

“Are you keeping track of everything I say that’s not modern?”

“I may have to. What if S.W.O.R.D. wants a report on any wacky behaviour we exhibited while in here?”

He sighs.

“I told you, this is normal for me.”

“So you say,” Darcy says with a narrowing of her eyes. “But I didn’t know you long enough on the outside to confirm your claim.”

“Skeptical is good,” Jimmy decides, just to end this. “Now let’s go find that house S.W.O.R.D. requisitioned for us.”

They set off into the black-and-white heart of suburbia. He looks frequently to the moon, the only thing he expects to appear the same, but its glow is too pale and cold.

Speaking of cold, a wind whips up, making the shutters of these artificially backdated houses clatter and tearing the leaves off trees. These go skating across their feet and Darcy shudders.

“You cold?”

She shrugs.

“Wanda coulda given me a sweater.”

She’s in a sleeveless dress and he’s an idiot for not offering his jacket sooner. He just hates to impose possibly overbearing chivalry on a woman who didn’t ask for it. Only Darcy doesn’t seem like she’d ask if the sky gave them a blizzard. Jimmy shrugs his jacket off and holds it out to her, to accept or decline.

“I hate messing up your look,” she says, slipping her arms into the sleeves.

“It was pretty good, huh?”

Jimmy smiles, running a hand down his tie.

“Dapper as hell,” Darcy praises. “Very Eliot Ness.”

He almost trips over his feet and she notices, looking at him with confusion. Rather than confess that the spy she just named has been his number one hero since childhood, he quickly thanks her.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she goes on as he navigates, pointing out their street sign. “Obviously, the FBI look has its own cachet, commands respect and that kinda thing, but what you have going on now…” Darcy motions to his wool trousers, the white shirt tucked neatly into them, and both secured with an unintrusive leather belt. “It makes me feel like I’m somehow the star in an Audrey Hepburn movie and you’re my leading man.”

“We’re not even minor characters,” he reminds her. “We’re extras.”

“Just let me tell you that you look cute too, would ya?”

That tongue-ties him because they’re here to do a job, but he _is_ the one who started the compliments on personal appearance, she’s right about that. And he barely realized he was doing it in the moment, which is unusual for him. Too often, Jimmy devotes so much time to rehearsing a comment in his head that he loses the chance to deliver it. In fewer words: flirting daunts him. The older he gets, the more getting it right seems to matter, and that pressure, in turn, makes him less likely to succeed. So it doesn’t make sense that it’s suddenly easy (or easier, anyway) here with Dr. Lewis.

Nevertheless, he’s somehow a version of himself who can flatter a woman off the cuff and not freak out about it until many minutes later. He could call it the potential effect of Wanda Maximoff’s telepathy, or the confidence boost of being a guy in a nicely made suit (he even has a hat, and feeling it perched jauntily atop his slicked hair miraculously doesn’t make him feel like a dork), but he’s definitely calling it progress.

So, when the wind kicks up even stronger at their backs and sends them lurching forward, Jimmy lets the hand he shot out to keep the coat across Darcy’s back settle on her shoulder instead as his arm drapes lightly around her. Her eyes flash to his and even with the grey-on-grey tones, he can tell her lipstick is dark red. He’s thinking pretty hard about that lipstick at the instant the door of the house they’re passing bangs open.

“Be quick about it, Dipper! Oh, good evening!”

Both Jimmy and Darcy are stock-still, her body tense at his side, as they track the voice to its source. It’s just an old woman, leaning out on her stoop as a dog with a jangling collar pokes around the front hedge.

“We’re almost at the house,” Jimmy says quietly, returning the woman’s friendly wave. “She’s our neighbour.”

Just like that, Darcy’s posture relaxes and she waves too.

“Frightful weather,” is the lady’s follow-up. “What has you out in it, Mr. and Mrs. Woo?”

Darcy glances up at him, communicating something, before calling back to the neighbour.

“We didn’t expect the weather to turn! We set off on a walk before this wind started, just to stretch our legs after the drive home from, uh, my sister’s place in, um, Cleveland.”

_Smart_ , Jimmy thinks. _Test the backstory, see if it’s been integrated into the public awareness_.

“You’ll have to come for lunch one afternoon, dear, and tell me about the trip.”

“You betcha!” Darcy says, before tilting her head towards his and muttering, “Do people say that in the sixties?” Before he can respond, she goes all in with another “You betcha!”

The woman’s dog relieves itself and scampers past her, back into the house.

“Now, you be sure to get her inside, Mr. Woo,” the old lady orders. “I can see your wife shivering from here.”

He laughs uncertainly.

“How many times do I have to insist you call us Darcy and Jimmy?”

_Test the names_ , he thinks. They’re gambling on those. S.W.O.R.D. attached their real names to the false record of him and Darcy as Westviewers, in case revealing themselves to Wanda at some point helped gain her trust, if they happen to cross paths with her or there’s a delay in extracting Monica.

“And I’m Martha to you, my boy!” the woman retorts jovially. She gives a final wave and retreats into her house.

Jimmy sighs in relief and they continue towards their destination.

“She thought we were married,” Darcy addresses almost immediately. She’s watching the pavement, so he can’t see her expression.

The observation is worth voicing, since S.W.O.R.D. kept their real last names too. He elects to think of it as a humbling—and crucial—reminder that they aren’t actually in control here.

“She did.”

“The Hex is letting me swear, but it draws the line at us shacking up together without being lawfully wed,” Darcy says, laughing loudly.

“Maybe… let’s just… not complain,” Jimmy says. Privately, he’s worried that the Hex (or Wanda?) can somehow hear them or detect that they’re being critical of this mixed bag of ’60s morality.

“Whatever you say, sugar. You’re the husband.” She chuckles again at the look on his face. “I’m kidding.”

But she reaches for the hand he still has slung over her shoulder and hangs on.

“‘Sugar,’” he mutters, mentally starting a tally for her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Longer and longer chapters as we go on! Thanks, everyone, for your support on chapter one yesterday!!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _We’ll be here when the world slows down/And the sunbeams fade away/Keeping time by a pendulum/As the fabric starts to fray_ \- "Come Along," Cosmo Sheldrake

The house is vaguely nice and neat, on a street of nice, neat houses, but Darcy doesn’t linger to admire it. She isn’t used to wearing heels and walking here from the barrier in these vintage boots is about as far as she cares to go.

“You got keys?” she asks Jimmy.

The car that’s supposedly theirs is in the driveway and might be a place to check, but Jimmy locates a spare key under the doormat and holds it up proudly.

“How thoughtful of us,” Darcy notes.

“I’m not gonna pretend to understand where fact meets fiction in here, but however that key got there, I appreciate it. Wouldn’t have wanted to break into our own house.”

She shakes her head, then happily stumbles inside as Jimmy gets the door open. Right away, she’s yanking her tall boots off and digging her toes into the plush carpet, where the foyer becomes the living room.

“This is probably a really disgusting colour,” Darcy says, “and the bathroom fixtures are probably, like, orangey-brown, but we don’t have to see any of it.” She looks back at Jimmy, who’s locking the door and flicking lights on. “That’s the first thing that’s made me glad we only see black and white.”

“I’m glad you’re like this,” he says, removing his shoes a little more tidily and lining them up against the wall by the front door. He puts his hat on a hook like he does it every day after work.

“Like what?”

“Optimistic. I’ve worked with my fair share of people who only saw the worst in every scenario.”

“That sounds shitty.”

“It was no picnic.”

Darcy squints at him, assessing.

“That one’s borderline.”

“‘No picnic’? Are you serious? People still say that.”

“But the very act of going on a picnic is outdated, _thus_ ,” she says emphatically, “comparing anything to the activity of picnicking is also outdated.”

“Don’t hate on picnics,” he warns sternly, accepting his jacket back when she passes it to him.

He definitely gives her a onceover during the handoff and there’s instantly a little more tension between them. Darcy felt it on the walk too. If trading compliments was gentle flirting, then him putting an arm around her just to keep her warm (when he’d already leant her his jacket) was Jimmy very obviously showing interest. And she didn’t hate it, then or now!

She falls into short-term flings often enough. During the empty years of the Blip, they could be a comfort, the shadow of intimacy. Or just a distraction from what so often seemed like the insane choice to pursue a doctorate in astrophysics. When a professor asked her one day what inspired her to choose their program, she almost said, “I know Thor—you know, from space?—and I just think he’s neat,” just to liven things up.

But rarely, so rarely, has Darcy felt this sort of attraction. She’s picked her partners based on a recognized mutual need so many times that feeling this thing, here in this room with Agent Woo, has her a little bit frantic, a little bit giddy with anticipation, a little bit wanting to tell him to take more than her jacket off of her.

“I would never,” she promises about the picnics. “I would love for picnics to make a comeback. I would happily host a picnic… right here, actually.”

With that, Darcy sits on their stellar carpet and, when she glances up to see Jimmy watching her, lies back. She stretches her stockinged legs out and crosses them at the ankles.

“No ants,” she notes.

Ok, something she’d like colour for that cancels out being blind to an ugly bathtub is to see whether or not her fake husband is blushing right now. He sits himself on the arm of their curved sofa and loosens his tie.

“That’s good,” he says. “I’d hate to have to call up an exterminator at this time of night.”

“I don’t even know what time it is. And I don’t care,” Darcy concludes with a sigh.

She closes her eyes, only to be roused by Jimmy’s quick, “Hey.” She looks at him. “You want a drink?”

“Do we _have_ a drink? Darling, I haven’t gone grocery shopping.”

Darcy likes the way Jimmy’s eyes look when she makes him smile.

“From the look of that cart, I’d say we’re better stocked with alcohol than anything we may actually need.”

Shifting on the carpet, she spots the mirrored drink cart by the wall. The glimmering bottles sitting atop it look promising. More promising than the fact that not a single item with obvious applications in spy work exists in this room. They knew the place came furnished, but they were kinda hoping for, like, a whiteboard and a laptop as well as tables and chairs. Alright, fine, maybe not a whiteboard and a laptop, but at least a chalkboard and a map to help them find their way around Westview as they stalk Monica and wait for the best time to attempt the extraction.

“Martini?” he asks, approaching the selection of their little bar.

“Please. You want me to check the fridge for olives?”

“I’ve got this covered, sweetheart. Don’t get up.”

Darcy laughs at the casual, joking endearment. She liked what he said about her optimism. She can definitely do this with him, complete this mission.

“I appreciate the concern for my tired feet,” she says.

“Are your feet tired?” Jimmy turns from the cart, leaving two drinks just waiting for the finishing touch. They—whoever’s house this was or was about to be when S.W.O.R.D. plucked it from real estate limbo—must store their glasses inside. “I was just thinking how great you look, right where you are.”

She snorts and sits up, feeling self-conscious, though his tone wasn’t gross.

“Are you aware,” she starts as he walks past towards the kitchen, “that you’re doing kind of a slick James Bond thing? Did you shake those martinis?”

Darcy hears him laugh and open the clunky-sounding door of the refrigerator. She feels her hair again and starts working the pins out of it. When the first heavy strand untwists to fall down her back, she sighs in relief. She could swear, the longer she sits here, the more it feels like she’s been on her feet in those boots all day and had her hair piled up just as long. _Thank god we’re home_ , she thinks, immediately uneasy over how very easy that thought was to have.

“Wow,” she hears, along with Jimmy’s faltering footsteps. She looks over her shoulder to see him holding a jar of olives. “Forget my Double-Oh-Seven thing,” he says. “What about your Bond girl thing?”

“What Bond girl thing?”

She frees another piece of hair and rubs gratefully at her scalp.

“You’re joking,” Jimmy says, expression looking like he’s waiting for the punchline. “You sprawl out on the rug, you moan when you take your hair down—”

“I did not.”

“Uh, you did. I heard you. Almost shut my hand in the fridge door. It’s been a while since I’ve been seduced, but I’m an FBI agent, Dr. Lewis. My powers of observation and deduction aren’t rusty, even in nineteen-sixty-whatever-year-this-is-supposed-to-be.”

“Buddy, you have that so backwards,” she assures him. “You, with the giving up your jacket and making me a drink. Please! Those are classic moves!”

Jimmy frowns suddenly and reapplies himself to the task of finishing their martinis with the _plink_ of skewered olives. He carries them over, handing hers down while he remains standing.

“Well, if you don’t notice what you’re doing and I don’t notice what I’m doing, I guess the question is… does it bother you?” He sips his drink.

“Which part?” Darcy asks, going for the olive first. While chewing, she continues, “The part where you can actually see how hot I am for you or the part where being in this place is almost definitely helping things along and we don’t really know why?”

“It’s very difficult to choose which half of that sentence to focus on.”

“ _That_ I am perfectly cognizant of.” She toasts him with an impish raise of her glass before taking her first swallow.

It tastes perfect. It tastes unreal. She catches Jimmy watching her lips on the glass. Her sip leaves a lipstick mark in an indeterminate shade of red, just a grey smudge. Darcy studies it and tries to concentrate on her memory of colours. She still finds herself searching the landscape of their living room for something vibrant, but it’s like her eyes—and her brain too, she assumes—are already adapting to the shortened spectrum. In the place of reds and blues and yellows, the range of greys seems to expand until she almost doesn’t miss what she’s not seeing.

God, is she drunk? That isn’t possible, though she’s taken another drink of her martini. She feels loose and comfortable though, her body warming up after walking here in the brisk wind. There’s also that other effect she associates with being a few drinks deep—her eyes keep raking over Jimmy. _You’re here on a mission, Darcy_ , she tells herself. _This is a job_.

She adjusts her glasses. They’re heavier on her face than usual because Wanda’s swapped out her 21st-century, high-quality plastic lenses for glass in a cat-eye frame. From what Darcy was able to assess before entering the Hex, everything in Westview _is_ Westview; Wanda hasn’t created matter out of nothing, just reconfigured it. That means her glasses are still her glasses. Her job is still her job. The pull she feels towards Agent Woo is equally real, if several stages advanced from where it was when they met and she put him at the top of her mental list of base personnel she found most attractive. When she looked and casually, noncommittally thought _I’d hit that_ , she wasn’t expecting to find herself openly flirting with him hours later while she sat on a luxurious carpet, drank a martini, and dismantled her beehive hairdo.

“So,” Jimmy says, walking backwards to perch on the sofa arm again, “it is helping things along for you? Not fabricating them?”

“I can’t tell whether this is an ego thing or research.”

He smiles, clearly unoffended by her wariness.

“Research. I want to make sure you’re acting of your own free will.”

“Hmm…” Leaving her hairpins, Darcy gets to her feet and pads over to the drink cart, depositing her unfinished martini. She turns to him. “It feels like I am, but I have determined that adding alcohol to this experience might not be the best choice. I don’t need anything more muddled than it already is.”

“What’s you and what’s this place, you mean.”

“Exactly.”

“Are you ever going to answer my question?” Jimmy smiles at her again, fingers steepled over the top of his glass as he balances the base on his knee.

She sighs, pretending to be thinking about it as she walks the longest route around the semi-circular couch, brushing against his calves before taking a seat at the end opposite to him. She hears the soft huff of his laugh before he repositions to keep her in his sights.

“Yes,” Darcy announces once she’s leaning into the cushions, her feet tucked up. “I was attracted to you before we came in here. It’s just… amplified now.”

She goes to scratch at her leg but remembers the stockings and stops. The last time she wore any type of pantyhose was for her uncle’s second wedding, a winter ceremony, and even then they were a mistake. Between the total drag of having to peel them down and inch them back up every time she went pee and the irritation of her legs getting hot and itchy from dancing, pantyhose are an item Darcy largely considers to be Not Worth It.

But the texture of these beneath her fingers feels a little nicer than the drugstore nylons she wore then. Although there hasn’t been an opportunity to _thoroughly_ examine her outfit, she’s aware that what’s going on under her dress shows a little more effort than her typical mismatched bra and underwear. Nice attention to detail, Hex/Wanda. Her girl is not going to set Darcy up to underwhelm if things progress with Mr. FBI with the cute smile at the far end of the couch.

“It’s the same for me,” Jimmy seems eager to confirm.

“And was it my lack of theories in regards to this place or my incessant demands for coffee that did it for you, Agent Woo?”

“Call me Jimmy, baby, we’re married.”

Darcy’s face flushes red-hot. It requires so little work for her to get a guy steamed under the collar—and so rarely are her minor exertions matched—that she forgot that this can also be the good, exciting part, with any potential naked conclusion still a ways off. Something she shares with Jimmy is that it’s been a while for her too, the being-seduced thing, but she is so game to be Wooed.

“ _Jimmy_ ,” she corrects. “How did you know I was the _one_? We’re married,” she echoes in defense of her joking upping of the ante.

He appears to grin at his own private thoughts, turning his head quickly away.

“A _HA_ ,” Darcy exclaims, thumping her hand against the couch. “I want _that_ answer, whatever you were just thinking.”

Jimmy looks at her again.

“You sure? Even if it’s…”

“ _Especially_ if it’s…”

He nods to himself, it looks like, then moves from the arm of the sofa down onto the cushion. Resting his arm along the back of the couch, he says, “Your mouth.”

Darcy laughs un-sexily because Jimmy’s response _is_ so very sexy. Possibly the most erotic answer he could’ve given because it’s neither vulgar nor obvious (and she has had a _lot_ of men lead off with a ‘compliment’ about her boobs). Her laughter trails off when she realizes he’s staring at her.

“I’m not laughing _at_ you,” she promises. “It’s a solid answer. I’m just _deeply_ surprised.”

“Darcy, I may be a youth pastor, but I’m not a nun.”

“First of all, I did not know that, and second of all, I’m pretty sure only women are nuns.”

“It’s a hypothetical commitment to the convent, ok? Let me have this. I love _The Sound of Music_.”

“Because it’s a classic about pissing off Nazis and upcycling your drapes into clothes! Anti-Nazi _and_ pro-environment!” Darcy agrees. She kicks her legs out across the center cushion that separates them, ready to enthuse about favourite movies. “Hey, that goatherd song could be our song.”

It’s a joke and she’s happy to see Jimmy take it that way, leaning back into the couch with a wide smile, relaxed. He’s still holding his glass, but he hasn’t drunk from it since she mentioned wanting to keep a clear head.

“I don’t know about that. Too much yodelling to be romantic.”

“Um,” she counters, “it’s yodelling _about_ romance. It’s a song about people, and goats, falling in love.”

“But we’re not in love.”

“Just married with a house in the suburbs.”

Jimmy grins at her.

“Touché.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter: More words. More '60s atmosphere. More sexual tension.
> 
> Many of you know me from my other Darcy/Jimmy fic, _[Only in a Sitcom](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29074917/chapters/71369655)_ , or other works, but if you don't, [I'm on Tumblr](https://forasecondtherewedwon.tumblr.com/) and happy to interact!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _So kiss me/There’s something in the air/And whether it’s love or lust/Should we care?_ \- "Freak in Me," Mild Orange

No, they’re not in love, they’re basically strangers, but Jimmy loves watching Darcy jerk her hands around as she re-enacts her favourite moments from the _Sound of Music_ puppet show, and he loves the frequent laughter from her that he never heard on the base, and he loves picturing her early struggles to make and alter her own clothes as she describes a disastrous attempt at turning denim overalls into shorts. They feel less like strangers in no time at all.

It’s the kind of conversation that exists somewhere between trying to pick someone up and talking with a good friend. Jimmy’s never really experienced both at once before. Dating for him is a handful of back-and-forth messaging on apps that it feels impossible to turn into a more meaningful relationship with his workload, or being set up with somebody within the Bureau. There’s never time like this, and, he thinks as he watches his new colleague carelessly, artlessly flip hair out of her face, there’s never been a woman like Dr. Darcy Lewis. He’s more sauced on her than on the martini he’s finally set aside on the coffee table. He thinks of Sherlock Holmes—another of his heroes—for whom Irene Adler is always the woman, and he watches Darcy _be_.

“You’re staring at my mouth,” she informs him suddenly.

“Because that’s where the words are coming from and I’m listening to you.”

“I know you’re listening, but what are you _thinking_?”

Darcy pokes his thigh with her toes and Jimmy swallows, glancing down at her leg. He wants to wrap his hand around the back of her calf to feel the shape of her leg. To touch the bare skin beneath. What is he thinking? A lot of things. He meets her eye.

“That our song can’t be the goatherd song. We can do better than that.”

She twists to look at the far wall.

“There’s a record player,” she informs him. “Let’s see what records we have.”

That seems like a reasonable plan to Jimmy. A reasonable plan to accomplish the wholly unnecessary task of finding the two of them a song to celebrate their fake marriage. (He loves this assignment.) There’s no reason why they shouldn’t, because the plan was always to get themselves established at the house before going in search of Monica. Anyway, it’s night now, so they’d only attract unwanted attention by patrolling the streets. Plus, finding their song contributes to their backstory and a strong cover is important. He saw the scene in the ’50s episode of _WandaVision_ where Wanda is questioned by Vision’s boss and can’t come up with any answers. Jimmy and Darcy have to play things smarter than that. The last thing they wanna do in here is follow Wanda and Vision’s example.

They rise and flip through the sleeves lining a shelf near the record player.

“Pick a top five,” Darcy instructs. “And I’ll pick _my_ top five.”

“Then we veto anything we can’t stand, and choose from whatever’s left?”

“Deal.”

There’s a lot of great stuff here, Jimmy thinks. An album selection just as well-appointed as the bar cart. He has most of Elvis’s ’50s and ’60s discography in his hands when Darcy gives him a skeptical look that reminds him he’s supposed to be picking five songs total. He puts all but one record back, smiling to himself because he’s somehow already a pushover for her.

Next to him, Darcy’s moving to an inaudible beat, bopping her head and twisting her feet back and forth across the carpet, like she’s testing out all of her prospective choices in her head first. When he catches her puckering her lips in contemplation, he laughs.

“What?” she says. “I can’t choose.”

“Why don’t we see where we’re at?”

“Progress report. Alright.”

After each reviewing their picks, they spread their respective five out on the floor.

“Hey,” Darcy notes, “we both have girl groups.” She aligns her album choice of _The Supremes A’ Go-Go_ with his of the Shirelles’ _Tonight’s the Night_. “Mine’s ‘You Can’t Hurry Love.’”

He has to laugh again at that, at how on-the-nose his _wife_ is being, at the dizzy, happy sensation of falling into this non-love feeling so fast.

“That’s fitting. And a great song. I have ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow.’”

“Jimmy Woo, you old romantic,” Darcy accuses.

And he can’t really defend himself as she crouches to examine his Frank Sinatra single: “The Way You Look Tonight.” She eliminates it so quickly that he retaliates by knocking out her choice of “You Really Got Me” by the Kinks.

“It’s too bouncy.”

“Too bouncy? Well, then we better get rid of this too,” she says, removing Elvis’s “All Shook Up.”

“But it’s Elvis,” he says seriously.

“I know,” Darcy replies, just as serious.

“Well, our song is not going to be country, so put ‘Stand by Your Man’ back.”

“You know what? I will gladly do that because I’m not sure I _want_ to stand by a man who can’t appreciate that song.”

Jimmy puts his hands in his pockets as he studies what they have left.

“I don’t know if I want us to share with a big movie,” he says, thinking aloud. He retrieves the Vogues’ _Memories_ album. “‘Earth Angel’ makes me think of _Back to the Future_ , which is an amazing movie, but…”

“We aren’t very George and Lorraine,” Darcy says. She gets it.

“I would punch a guy for you though. If there were a situation.”

He clears his throat, slipping his hands back out of his pockets to clasp one around his opposite wrist behind his back, trying to give the comment a professional air. It wasn’t supposed to sound so specifically protective. Jimmy would protect anyone who needed help. It’s a combination of his training and his personality and it’s definitely not about Darcy in particular and— Oh, heck. Lying to himself only ever works for a few seconds.

“I’m not sure what I’m supposed to offer in exchange? The big thing Lorraine does for George is give him three kids and, honey, we’d have to go over the finances with a fine-toothed comb. College for three? I don’t know if we can swing it.”

Before he can blurt out how much he loves kids, she goes on.

“What’s my ‘big movie’ song?”

“‘I’m a Believer,’” he says, nodding at the Monkees single. “Obviously. From _Shrek_.”

Darcy laughs hard and so does he, even though he’s feeling a little defensive over her reaction.

“I mentor children and teenagers,” Jimmy reminds her. “Sometimes, they just need something to keep them entertained for a while.”

“The Monkees are outta here. I don’t need your first thought when you hear that song to be Shrek, and then me second.”

“Yes, dear.”

After all this ruthless cutting, they’re left with their original all-female groups, the Beatles, and the Beach Boys.

“Honey,” Darcy asks, looking up at him sadly, “is our taste in music basic?”

“You brought the Beatles.”

“Oh, like the Beach Boys are a bunch of unknowns.” She rolls her eyes, but she picks up the sleeve, flipping it over to scrutinize the track list. “Which song?”

“‘Darlin’.’”

“Yeah?”

“No, that’s the name of the song.”

“I actually don’t think I know that one.”

Jimmy holds out his hand for the record, even more excited about his choice. At first, it was just one in a bunch, but he has a good feeling about it now. It could be special, if she likes it. He hopes she will.

When he drops the needle, she goes, “Oh.”

“Good oh?”

“Mhmm. This isn’t what I was expecting. It’s sweet, but it doesn’t make my teeth ache. Now, I’m just trying to imagine where we would’ve heard this song. You know, to decide that it was our song.”

“What about right here?” Jimmy suggests, offering his hand.

“Smooth,” Darcy says, slapping her palm to his and letting him help her up off the floor. “Very smooth.”

Instinctively, he clasps her hand tighter and guides her in, her back to his chest. The whiff of hairspray takes him right back to sitting on the bathroom counter as a kid while his mom dolled herself up for date night with his dad. She’d probably get a kick out of Darcy. With a quick little sway to the beat, left to right, he moves Darcy with him, then pushes her gently away again and lets go.

She doesn’t falter, rocking side to side on her own. Though Jimmy’s not a great dancer, he likes watching Darcy. _Oh-oh-oh darlin’_ , the song goes, and he smiles along, the memory of her fingers alive on his hand. Hairspray’s still faint in the air, mingling with the scent of lived-in house. It feels like they’re adding to this place, to a room—and a life—that were already here. Their journey out of town is only a backstory, but he really does feel like this house was meant for them to rest in. It’s probably just the stark, brisk hours on the S.W.O.R.D. base that are making this place feel so homey, Jimmy tells himself. Yep, that’s all it is.

“You really gonna let me dance by myself?” Darcy accuses.

“I only dance when I’m alone.”

“Uh, dude, you’re supposed to dance _like_ no one’s watching, not _when_ no one’s watching.” She bumps her slipping glasses back into place with a knuckle and throws a rhythmic shoulder shimmy into her moves. “Anyway, it’s just the two of us. I won’t rat you out to Hayward for having two left feet if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“Funny story about two left feet. I was working this case maybe, hmm, four years ago now, and—”

“That was a really good try,” Darcy says, grinning and she dances his way. “Seriously, I almost believe that’s a real thing that happened to you.”

“It didn’t happen to _me_ , thank goodness, but it was definitely a real thing.”

“Whatever you say, Agent Woo. Your nasty feet stories will not save you from me.”

“How are you almost making it sound worse than it is?” he groans as he lets her take his hand and raise it into a dancing posture. He puts the other on her waist, moulding his fingers into the curve of her body beneath the straight sheath of her dress.

“It’s part of the super-special skillset that got me hired to be your wife.”

“You weren’t hired to be my wife.”

“Kinda seems like I was.”

Jimmy doesn’t bother rebutting Darcy’s assertion. It’s easier to sway side-to-side, trying not to move his feet too much, and make it through the end of “Darlin’” and the short duration of “I’d Love Just Once to See You” when Darcy refuses to let go.

He knows it’s his fault for starting this. He can’t explain why the need to pull her in the first time was so irresistible. Oh, he wanted to do it, it just seems like the distance between instinct and action keeps shortening and lengthening. He has these moments of impulsiveness, and in those moments, he doesn’t even consider the consequences of flirting with her or holding her up against him. In his job, he requires both deliberation and the ability to make split-second decisions, but there isn’t usually a lot of overlap; the deliberation comes first, the quick thinking later, and only if it becomes necessary to troubleshoot because something’s gone wrong. This world—the Hex—is yo-yoing Jimmy through his natural reactions. Presumably, it’s doing the same to Darcy.

“That’s enough,” he declares as “Here Comes the Night” begins to play.

“I guess that wasn’t bad for a first attempt,” she allows him, moving to put him and the Beach Boys out of their misery. “I have a feeling you’ll last longer next time.”

His face is warm as he turns away and wipes a hand across his mouth. Is she flirting? Of course she’s flirting. What’s he gonna do about it? Get some space for a minute.

It startles him when Sinatra begins to croon.

“I thought Sinatra was too old-school romantic for you?” he checks, glancing back.

“He still is, but this is your reward for being a good sport. You don’t have to dance anymore,” she hurriedly assures him. “It’s just… mood music.”

Jimmy laughs nervously.

“I think we have a dangerous amount of mood without it.”

Her shrug is innocent enough, but he spots the self-aware little smirk as she turns her face away, hiding behind all of that lustrous hair.

“I’m going to look around,” he tells her before he can succumb to the urge to walk over there and scoop that hair behind her ear, maybe whisper something into it. “See what the Hex has given us to work with.”

“This place seems pretty great so far.”

Jimmy crosses the room, then looks at Darcy again. She’s right about that.

Ignoring the kitchen and the dark dining room beyond, he heads down the hall off the living room, passing a bathroom, then a closed door. Opening it, he discovers a good-sized home-office space. It looks promising, big enough for both of them to work in here as they spitball ideas for tracking down Monica, interacting with her, and convincing her to leave with them. He doesn’t know which they’ll need to focus on yet. They’ll know more when they find her.

There are a few sheets of paper stacked neatly on the desk and, for a moment, Jimmy doesn’t touch them. It feels like he’s broken in and is about to rifle through someone’s private documents. Then, he remembers he owns this house. The top page is actually the record of the sale and he laughs. Proceeding through them, he realizes these are the accoutrements of the profession he has in here, in Westview. Very quickly, he sees that his position as an FBI agent has been poorly translated into a job as a _real estate_ agent. He bends to read the biography of himself on a page of recent testimonials from happy new homeowners.

“Any thousand-dollar science equipment in here?”

“Heavens to Murgatroyd,” Jimmy gasps, spinning to find Darcy leaning in the doorway.

“‘Heavens to Murgatroyd’? You’ve outdone yourself.”

“You startled me.”

“I wanted to see if you’d found anything helpful.”

He holds up the pages and she cranes her neck forward as she peers at them.

“They made me a real estate agent, so I wouldn’t get your hopes up. You’re probably just a hobby astronomer in here.”

“Well, that would be bullshit,” Darcy states succinctly, “and I would be airing my grievances at the next town council meeting. Hey, I wonder if there’s even a mayor, what with Wanda kinda seeming to be at the center of things.”

Jimmy nods, putting the papers back, but he can tell he’s losing focus. With Darcy in the room, the mission feels secondary.

“Are you going to tell me about some gross case involved a dismembered mayor or something?”

“What?” He blinks, alert.

“In an attempt to sidetrack me from my plan—which, for the record, was not a real plan—to announce to the citizens of Westview that I am unsatisfied with my fake career prospects, thereby blowing our cover to hell. Or do you only tell disgusting stories when you’re trying to get out of dancing?”

“I trust you to not actually do that,” Jimmy says, letting her question be rhetorical.

“That’s good,” Darcy informs him, stepping into the office, “because, as you’ll recall, your last attempt at sidetracking me did not work.”

The next actions belong to him, but it has to be the Hex hitting some override button in his head that makes it seem right to respond to his wife’s light teasing by grabbing her by the hips, her footsteps stuttering across the floor as he pulls her to him. He’s suddenly breathing a little harder, head angled, mouth poised over hers.

_You don’t have to do this right now_ , some rational part of his brain tells him. _Keep it professional. She’s not really your wife_. _You can want her without acting on it_.

That’s right. He knows it’s right. And Jimmy _is_ lifting his head when Darcy grips his tie and brings his lips down to hers, making full contact.

Ok, now he’s screwed.

She shoves the papers he’s just put back on the desk and they flutter to the floor, their soft creasing as they hit like the sound of waves breaking at a distance. He guides her back, feels her hop up onto the edge. She’s working into his mouth with her tongue as he presses forward to stand between her parting thighs. Plunging one hand into her hair, he brings the other to the warm crook of her knee, jerking it up to his hip. Darcy still has his tie in her fist and he groans into her mouth when she gives it a little tug.

Whoa, wait a second. Wasn’t he just telling himself he was stronger than this? For the sake of his own self-respect, Jimmy takes his hands off of Darcy and steps back.

“Uh…” she says. Her lipstick’s smudged and he knows it’s gotta be all over his mouth too. “Ok, good talk, I’m just going to go to another room that’s not this one.”

“Yeah, that’s… that’s probably a good idea.”

He flattens his tie against his chest and she watches, and he watches her watch, and then, abruptly, she hops off the desk and he nods rapidly as she books it out of the room. She closes the door after her, cutting off Sinatra’s rendition of “You Go to My Head.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _The thrill of the thought/That you might give a thought to my plea/Casts a spell over me/Still, I say to myself, get a hold of yourself_ \- "You Go to My Head," Frank Sinatra


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _When it's all said and done, you can change your mind/But something tells me we should be sharing the night_ \- "July," Far Caspian

How long have they been in Westview? An hour? Darcy can’t check her watch because it’s been Hex’d away, probably going into the matter that made up the insane volume of her hair before she brought that puppy down like a building implosion. And it’s not like she can whip out her phone either because _WandaVision_ ’s rolled the calendar _way_ back—back to beehives and record players and melting into a man when he kisses you. Or you kiss him. She’s happy to bring a little of the modern gal to this ’60s do-over. She just hadn’t planned on doing it quite like this.

Ok, so, she planted one on Jimmy. One very obvious and prolonged one involving that impassioned scramble to clear his desk so he could, what? Do her on top of it? Jeeze Louise. (She doesn’t say that out loud in case the vintage vernacular summons her better half.)

Darcy escapes down the hall on legs that are, frankly, a little weak-kneed. When Jimmy hiked her leg up against him like that… _whew_. Even after the fact, she feels a flush of heat up the back of her neck. Fanning herself with one hand, she tugs off her clip-on earrings with the other, one at a time, and ducks into the bathroom. She flips on the light. Nudging the perfect rectangle of soap aside, she drops her earrings into the soap dish, then confronts her reflection. That girl looks like she just got some—lipstick smeared, hair wild from her man’s eager hands. She actually has to duck her head for a second to coax her heartbeat back down. Her mouth tastes like martini.

“Ok,” Darcy says briskly, snapping herself out of it before she can dwell on the memory of him watching her drink. “Get ready for bed. Brush your teeth. A mouth full of toothpaste is the least sexy thing there is.”

So, she does it, washes her face too, until she no longer looks like she’s doing a walk of shame inside her own (temporary) home. It might’ve been just a kiss, but it also wasn’t anything close to just a kiss. The thing that won’t leave her alone is how that kiss felt like the very beginning. It was easy to start and hard to stop. Usually not a great combo. Not in mysterious, radioactive anomalies, not in the vaguely distasteful momentum of S.W.O.R.D. directors, and not in falling head over go-go boots for a co-worker. They’re probably just acclimating to this place, she tells herself as she passes on taking a shower; she has what seems like a reasonable fear that whatever the hell that lust was will come over her again and she’ll drag Jimmy into the spray with her.

Back in the hallway, she scampers past the office—door’s still shut, light coming from the crack at the bottom—towards the bedrooms. There are three doors off the hall, two on the left and one on the right. She tries the first on the left and reveals a linen closet, smelling like the bedding when she stayed overnight at her grandparents’ house as a little girl. Not right, but comforting. Darcy takes a sniff of fresh laundry and lavender, then shuts the door softly.

On the same side of the hall, she opens the other door to find a bedroom with a pair of beds. She turns the light on and wonders what colour the walls might be. It’s cute, in a once-again-reminding-her-of-her-grandparents’-house way. She likes the idea of two smaller beds in the same room; makes sense for entertaining, with multiple close friends staying the night. In another life, maybe she and Jimmy do throw parties in this house, great parties, where their pals let loose and drink so many of her husband’s first-rate cocktails that they can’t drive home. But that sweet little side dish of an alternate life in Westview comes with a heaping helping of mind control, which is not so great. Darcy will keep the Hex’s gentler wingman-ing and forgo a fuller married life.

The final door leads to Narnia. It has to, or else the Hex is playing a very unfunny joke on her. This room is full of clothes. Darcy stoically troops inside, brushing coats out of her path, and pulls the dangling string to switch on the overhead light in the center of the room. Nope, it’s all clothes. Sweaters folded in nooks, trousers draped over hangers, even a spectacular party dress on a headless mannequin. ( _Ok, no thank you, nightmare fuel_ , she thinks.) After patting the far wall for a secret panel—she’s not proud—she turns around and marches straight back out.

She returns to the linen closet, even the bathroom, before going back to the living room, where they began their night. Nothing bedroom-y here. Nevertheless, she flips up the sofa cushion to make sure there isn’t a pull-out mattress under there. Nope. She strides through the kitchen to the dining room and stares out the back windows into the yard. She blinks a few times.

Alright, well, there’s no garage, so no chance of an over-garage apartment. Ignoring the conclusion her logical brain has drawn, Darcy investigates the first—and only ( _no, brain, shut up_ )—bedroom again. There _is_ another door that she didn’t get far enough into the room to see last time, but all it’s hiding is a master bathroom. Fuck.

Darcy retreats to the walk-in closet because, if she has a breakdown, she wants to take it out on the mannequin. She shuts herself in and tries to take some grounding breaths. Her gaze lands on a neat stack of men’s matching pajama sets. She swipes the set on top, some dark-coloured cotton with white piping around the collar, and leaves the room on a nerves-induced autopilot that the Hex couldn’t take credit for if it wanted to.

Wrenching the door to the office open, she walks right up to Jimmy and slaps the pajama set to his chest. He looks surprise. Oh boy, he better buckle up.

“Brought you some PJs. There’s only one bedroom.”

With that, she turns her back on him and heads right on back to the safety of the walk-in.

* * *

What she will give people of the ’60s is that they had impeccable wardrobes. Once Darcy’s calmed down enough to begin accepting the situation, she finds her own miniature pajama department within the walk-in closet, and everything matches. There are cap-sleeved button-up jammie shirts with soft, coordinating, pedal-pusher bottoms. There are flowy and frilly nightgowns with round necks and square necks. For every bedtime ensemble, there are robe options, slipper options, and even very glamorous-seeming scarf options, if she had a headful of curlers she wanted to protect from her unconscious tossing and turning.

Darcy gets changed, finally confronting this whole stockings/clips/not-quite-round-cup’d bra situation. She’s annoyed when she finds a drawer of pantyhose. Those would’ve simplified things a little. Thank god she’ll be dressing herself for the rest of this stay in the Hex.

Full of that sense of agency, she gets herself a nightie (her skin feels pinched after unfamiliar undergarments, so she’s going easy-breezy), then dons the robe and slippers that appear to go with it, feeling like ’60s Barbie would look at her and see a worthy successor. There’s no tie on the robe, but she holds it in place with crossed arms as she steps tentatively out of the walk-in. When she’s snug in her full-size bed, she can strip the robe off and stuff it down the side. Until then… well, she’s keeping an extra layer between her unpredictably surging libido and Jimmy.

He’s in the bedroom when she gets there. _The_ bedroom. Just the one in this house. Two bathrooms, yep, but only one bedroom. Some real estate skills her husband has, finding them a house with only one bedroom. (Yeah, Darcy knows Jimmy had nothing to do with selecting this place, but S.W.O.R.D.’s felt very far away since they arrived.)

Despite her apprehensions, there’s no immediately charged atmosphere when she walks into the room. Jimmy’s in his PJs, looking like he just wandered out of the en suite because he’s in the middle of brushing his teeth. She laughs without thinking about it and he turns at the sound, smiling around his toothbrush.

“Gehin wehy ow hair,” he seems to say.

Darcy frowns and Jimmy points at the window. It’s covered by a thin curtain and their next-door neighbour must have a porch light on or something because she can see the spooky outline of tree branches swaying.

“ _Oh_ ,” she says, comprehending his toothbrush-speak. “It’s getting windy out there. Yeah, looks like it.”

A branch raps suddenly against the glass and she jumps.

But there’s something about what just occurred that bugs her. Darcy squints at the window across the room. Branch hitting a window… She only saw a little of today’s episode of _WandaVision_ before she and Jimmy had to leave the base, but she’s pretty sure the same thing happened on the show. Of course, two different branches hitting two different windows on the same blustery night is _not_ a portent of the supernatural. Was there a tree out front when they got here though? Something close enough to the house and short enough to clack against their first-story window? Honestly, Darcy was paying more attention to her tired feet and the sudden news of her _marriage_ at the time.

She’ll look in the morning. Everything can be dealt with in the morning.

Jimmy’s gone back into the bathroom—she can hear the water running as he washes toothpaste down the drain—and between how unconcerned he seemed with her proximity and her desire to quit freaking out about stuff after the scare with that stupid tree branch, Darcy decides she can handle this. She was clearly wrong about the kiss; it was a fluke and going to bed with her robe on is a ridiculous overreaction.

Peeping behind the bedroom door, she discovers a row of hooks. She’s hanging her robe on one when Jimmy comes back out of the bathroom.

“Darcy?”

“Yeah?” There, it’s on. The slippery fabric seemed like it wouldn’t stay for a few seconds there.

“There were two beds, right?” Jimmy asks, voice coming out slow and unnerved.

She snorts, turning.

“Jimmy, what kind of a… of a question…”

She can’t make it to the end of a sentence that doesn’t matter. _Yes_ , there were two beds. _Yes_ , Jimmy’s question is warranted, because when Darcy surveys the room, there’s just one queen-sized bed. She laughs uncomfortably.

“Can you explain this?” he asks her, so seriously that she laughs again.

“With science? I think _magic_ probably has more answers.”

“But magic is science, isn’t it? In here? You had equipment at the base. You discovered the broadcast signal.”

“Technically, yes,” she allows, holding up her hands to temper his insistence. “But even if I could explain the exact process by which two little beds became one big one in a span of _seconds_ with _no noise_ , I couldn’t give you the why to go with that how. Science is just questions, and then more questions.”

“How’s that different from magic?”

“I guess with magic you accept that you’ll never be in on how the magician pulled off the trick. With science, you keep asking.”

Which is precisely what Darcy wonders if she should be doing—verbalizing her confusion to work through the problem aloud—instead of just staring at this bed with its covers neatly turned down. _Invitingly_ turned down. She glances at Jimmy and they catch each other looking.

“I’ll go sleep on the couch. No,” he says, raising a hand before she can get her response out, “it’s fine. We can figure something else out tomorrow.”

He goes to walk past her, out the bedroom door, and it has to be a minor earthquake or something that causes them to stumble into each other. Jimmy takes Darcy by her bare shoulders to steady her and their eyes lock. She can’t tell if he’s about to push her away or pull her in.

“I’m- I’m fine,” she chokes out.

His eyes skim down her knee-length nightgown, but he seems to pin his gaze to the floor. That’s where he’s still looking when he nods in acknowledgement, then removes his hands, leaving the bedroom.

The throb of Darcy’s heart feels big and cartoonish. She gets it now, why Wanda flops back against her door like that in episode one. You need a gesture of overstated comedic relief after the farce of life in an old sitcom. Darcy’s not even _in_ the sitcom, just on the periphery, but she does feel better when she eventually closes the bedroom door and slumps against it.

There’s a knock.

It isn’t the tree on the window, it’s a fist on the other side of the door.

Darcy moves and opens it to find Jimmy’s sheepish expression.

“I forgot our couch is a weird shape,” he explains. “I tried to lie different ways, but…”

“I can’t help but feel this is intentional,” she says, waving him back into the bedroom.

“Oh, no, Darcy, I can get some blankets and sleep in the office or something.”

“I didn’t mean what _you’re_ doing is intentional,” she says, shaking her head wearily. “I mean it’s _WandaVision_ , or the Hex, or whatever. We can stay up all night trying to fight it and be exhausted tomorrow when we need to locate Captain Rambeau, or we can just share the damn bed.”

She swears he tilts towards her when she says it and she is ready to put up zero resistance, but then Jimmy seems to collect himself and walks around to the far side of the bed. He’s looking pretty sharp in his vintage jammies and if not for the steamy office make-out just a little while ago, she’d definitely compliment him.

“We should probably talk for a while,” he says.

“Yeah, ok. Talking sounds… safe.”

Darcy swings her arms as Jimmy appears to kick off his slippers (she can’t see below his knees with the bed between them) before sitting on top of the blanket, back against the headboard.

“So…” she says, quickly going to sit, likewise slipper-less, on her own side. “We haven’t really seen Wanda out and about on the show. If she stays at home again this episode, we’re free to wander Westview looking for the Captain. Where do you think we should start?”

“Oh, the mission, right.”

“Is that not what you wanted to talk about?”

Tense, Darcy rubs her earlobe between finger and thumb. She didn’t notice when she took the clip-on earrings off, but the Hex better not have un-pierced her ears. She’s had those holes since she was three. Just because she holds an advanced degree and runs with superheroes doesn’t mean she can guarantee she wouldn’t cry like a baby getting her ears pierced at thirty-four.

“I kinda thought we could get to know each other,” Jimmy says, then yawns. “Sorry. I shouldn’t be tired, it’s only…”

“Yeah, daytime still where we came from. And don’t apologize. I’m tired too. Maybe we have, like, Hex lag or something. Like jet lag. We’re adjusting to the time difference.”

“Which time difference? The sixty years or going from afternoon to after midnight?”

Darcy shrugs with her hands up and yawns in response.

“Anything is possible. We’re not just people now, we’re characters. Mr. and Mrs. Woo,” she says, recalling their neighbour’s greeting.

“If my mom could see me now,” Jimmy says with a chuckle.

“Tell me about it. Mine’s really proud of me for becoming an astrophysicist and everything, but I think she still wishes the M in ‘STEM’ stood for ‘married’.”

“It’s not as though—” He interrupts himself with a larger yawn that he swiftly covers with his hand. “Excuse me.”

“We can lie down and talk,” Darcy suggests. Otherwise, Jimmy seems in danger of dropping off right where he sits.

She switches on her bedside lamp, then rises to get the overhead light.

“Easier on the eyes,” Jimmy says from behind her. “And the lighting change isn’t bad either.”

Darcy thinks he’s joking with her until she turns and sees he’s under the covers now, adjusting his pillow.

“Pardon?”

He doesn’t seem to hear her.

She should stop and think about this, but as soon as she steps towards the bed, doing anything but crawling into it feels like the wrong choice. Though she can tell she has a choice, more of one than she had when the Hex pulled them both in. There just doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with letting this play out, seeing if she and Jimmy still have chemistry. Her inhibitions are down as she peels the covers back and climbs in. She doesn’t go anywhere near him, keeping well to her side and pushing the hem of her nightgown down her legs.

“I’m not as tired now,” he notes, rolling onto his side to face her.

Darcy props her head up with her hand and considers her own exhaustion level.

“Huh. Me neither.”

She starts to sit up and feels immediately sleepy, but when she sinks down again, she wants to stay in bed for a totally different reason.

“Your pajamas fit ok?” she asks lightly.

“Like they were made for me.”

“Well, they were, right? The Hex made this generic house into _our_ house.”

“It would’ve been empty before S.W.O.R.D. falsified our ownership,” Jimmy says thoughtfully. “Nothing we own existed a few hours ago.”

“Feels pretty solid to me,” she says, taking her glasses off and reaching to set them on the nightstand, then tucking the blanket around her waist. It draws his eye down from her face.

“We just have to keep our heads and remember it isn’t real.”

“Of course.” She scoots a little closer to him, only because he’s speaking more quietly and he’s fuzzy without her glasses.

“Those Elvis records, the jar of olives in the fridge, your nightgown…” Jimmy extends his arm across the mattress and Darcy shifts to let him slip it under her neck, her pulse racing against his pajama sleeve. “…they were all made out of thin air.”

“And they could all disappear just as easily,” Darcy says, finishing his thought. “The records, the olives…” Her heart beats fast as her fake husband’s arm curls to bring her closer. “…the nightgown.”

“Like magic.”

Beneath the covers, his other hand touches her waist.

“Like _science_ ,” she corrects.

“Mrs. Woo,” Jimmy murmurs, “I believe we agreed those things were one and the same.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _Don't it feel like that night was from a dream?/I've never felt nothing like that/Looking at you, looking right back_ \- "Little of Your Love," HAIM

Darcy draws her knees up a little and they make passing contact with his thighs. Her bare knees. His legs in the pajamas she picked out for him. The two of them, married, in bed together, all at the urging of the Hex, but none of it anything Jimmy would care to say no to.

The texture of her nightgown is flimsy and filmy under his hand on her waist. He searches the corners of his self—less changeable than those of the house they’re in—and can’t find enough restraint to pull away from her. All he can do is touch her without touching her _more_ , hold her without holding her _desperately_ , keep it appropriate when being under the covers with her in his arms is already _inappropriate_ for any kind of relationship but a romantic one. Which he would like to have with her. Oh, but he shouldn’t!

Even with his self-imposed paralysis, the struggle must be in his expression because Darcy places one fingertip between his eyebrows, where he always scrunches his face when he’s distressed.

“Does it bother you?” she asks, taking her hand away when he relaxes his face.

“What?”

“Earlier? Remember? You said if what we were doing felt so natural to both of us that we’d done it all instinctually, the only real question was whether it bothered us. So, are you bothered?”

He cracks a smile.

“Hot and bothered maybe.”

But she doesn’t toss back anything witty in response. Ok, they’re really talking about this. That’s good. (Even if the delay _feels_ bad with their bodies heating the small amount of space left between them, space he’d like to fill as fast as the Hex filled their house with furniture.)

“No, Darcy,” Jimmy assures her, “I’m not bothered. This… influence—” is the word he settles on and he can tell she knows what he means without him needing to say more, “—is like the annoying friend who bugs you all night, trying to get you to cross the room and talk to some beautiful woman you can’t even bring yourself to look at for too long because you don’t really want to see how out of your league she is.”

“We all have that friend,” Darcy agrees, shifting her neck against his arm.

The spot she took the pressure off reacts like a lit sparkler, tingling wildly. Just another thing that doesn’t want him to stay in this position this long. Inevitably, he’ll coax her in his direction, or advance in hers.

“But I _am_ interested in that woman. You,” he simplifies, lurching through his words. “I’m interested in you. Genuinely.”

“If the Hex would quit being a dick about it for five seconds, right?” She grins. “Our mutual friend is so pushy.”

He breathes quickly through his nose when her arm suddenly wraps around him, her palm against the middle of his back. Now, his fingers tighten at her waist.

“What do you say to making it the uncomfortable third wheel?”

“I say the Hex is going to have to share the cab ride home with itself because I’m spending the night here.”

Slowly, Jimmy lifts his head from his pillow and leans forward, face angled over Darcy’s. Unlike the last time, in the office, she doesn’t rush to kiss him. She just stares the few inches up at him with her eyes big and grey and deep in the darkness. Her touch is light and low on his neck, where the line of his collared shirts irritated him when he was a young man, getting used to wearing a dress shirt and tie to work every day, not just church on Sundays. He’s hardly ever touched there. Either it’s that much easier to feel his pulse jumping with her fingers caressing his skin or his heart’s just beating very quickly. Takes a lot to do that. Between the exertions of work and softball, Jimmy has a very good resting heartrate.

Her eyelids flutter shut, lashes dark and even, and his eyes close in response as he dips down to meet the encouraging upward tilt of her chin. After a quick press of his lips to hers, he breaks it off, then kisses her more firmly. Darcy inhales sharply and uses her grasp on him to wriggle closer.

Jimmy gathers her in, warm and miraculous. Brain-quakingly substantial under his hands after watching her in her ’60s day look, the pair of them just paper dolls in period costume as they flirted on their curved couch with lamplight glinting off their martini glasses. This doesn’t have the distance of a movie. When her mouth leaves his to kiss his throat instead, he glides his hand from her waist to her hip, almost shaking with how badly he wants to wrap her leg around him again. Overwhelmed, excited, body reacting like a teenager’s. Those nebulous days of having to peel off his sweatshirt to set in his lap if a girl touched his arm passing the attendance sheet.

“Darling, you’re tense,” Darcy murmurs. Her teeth graze his neck and he swallows as his eyes roll back. “You nervous?”

“I don’t want to push you.”

She lifts her head and, after he darts in to kiss her mouth, smirks. She brings a hand to his chest and undoes the top button of his pajama shirt, so slowly it’s ridiculous. It makes him laugh. Seems like that was her goal. She moves her face close again, rubbing his nose with hers.

“You can push a little,” she whispers.

His fingers dig deep into her hair to cradle the back of her head and she comes willingly with a gentle flex of his hand. This time, kissing her, he reminds himself that they’re adults, pulling Darcy’s thigh up to his hip after he feels her knee brush intentionally against his leg. She goes back to working on his buttons with both hands and he runs a hand up her thigh, pushing the nightgown’s hem higher. Her skin’s as soft as the greys of the bedroom around them. A branch taps the window again, but it’s the last time he’s aware of any sound other than the ones coming from his wife.

It feels like his skin could be burning when she flattens her palm to his uncovered chest. Jimmy tries to shrug the shirt away without separating his mouth from Darcy’s and he does it, with her help. Her hands take confident hold of his arms, clinging when the muscles flex as he reaches for her ass, pressing her hips flush to his. It’s all one motion as he rolls on top of her.

“You work fast,” she says with a grin, hair splayed over the pillow.

“At the office, they joke that my middle initial stands for ‘Efficient.’”

“Sexy.”

That could be a joke or honest-to-goodness praise of his competence. Or, with Darcy, it could be both. He’s definitely found _her_ competence attractive; at the base, she set up her own equipment, investigated the phenomenon on her own initiative, and appeared to work better independently than all of the S.W.O.R.D. agents worked combined. They wouldn’t have brought her in if she weren’t the best and, yes, that turns him on.

“I bet you say that to all your FBI liaisons,” he teases as he holds himself above her.

“Only the ones I find myself accidentally married to.”

“So just me then.”

“Oh no,” Darcy says, mouth curled up at the corners. “This happens to me surprisingly often. Wormholes and parallel dimensions. I’m married in six different alternate univ—”

Jimmy mashes his mouth to hers, feeling her giggle against him. The high sound tumbles down her throat and pushes out again as a moan. Some of it escapes as his lips work hers open, making him sweat and clutch her waist, balling the fabric of her nightgown in his fist as he fits his hips between her thighs. He grunts softly at the relief.

With a brief arch of her back, Darcy urges him to hold her body tighter to his. He shifts his hand up to her breast, dragging the material as it sticks to his damp palm, and he can suddenly feel the heat of her, below, against him, his pajama pants the only thing keeping them apart. She rocks her hips slightly as though she’s feeling him out. His head feels cottony with lust and he breaks the kiss to breathe.

To breathe and to be able to look in her eyes when he runs his hand down from her breast to trace between her legs, momentarily lifting his hips out of the way.

She’s not a gun—she won’t go off that easy. Still, he’s cautious, not aggressive, until she wraps her hand around his and shows him how she likes to be touched. Jimmy hears himself let out a sympathetic gasp as Darcy’s breath hitches, her clitoris swollen under his fingertips. He paints arousal up to it from her entrance to slick his touch. The _noise_ she makes. He’s fully hard in his pajamas, kissing her with fresh frenzy.

He rubs until she whines, until she’s moving her hips more than he’s moving his hand. He rubs until she grabs his shoulder and makes a broken sound that their kiss can’t smother.

“ _Mrs. Woo_ ,” Jimmy croons admiringly, kissing the underside of her jaw while Darcy pants hard to catch her breath.

“Heavens to Murgatroyd, Jimmy.”

She lets out a burst of laughter at her own words and claps a hand to the back of his neck. He nuzzles his face into her, breathing the scent of her skin and hair. Closing his eyes, he listens hard to the trailing notes of her laugh. Before he knows exactly what’s happening, Darcy’s squirming beneath him, pulling her nightgown off.

“There,” she says triumphantly, flinging it away across their bedroom.

“There,” he agrees in a choked voice.

His gaze hopscotches down her front—mouth, clavicle, breasts, hop, turn, and back the way he came.

“May I?”

Her hands are on his waistband. One of his is still on her inner thigh while the other combs absently through her long hair.

“Yes, definitely yes.”

The stark earnestness will have to do. Jimmy wanted to make a joke about doing it for the backstory, something about consummating their marriage, but it sounded cheap in his head. He’s not that guy. He’s the guy out of step, inviting a woman to meet his friends as she’s breaking up with him, cooking breakfast only to find his late-night companion slipping out the front door. He openly _tries_ and _wants_ and _needs_ and that’s never really meshed with the people he’s been with. Heck, he technically married Darcy Lewis before the Hex loosened him up enough to flirt with her.

There’s real and fake and telling the difference is a whole job on top of the one he already has. A job he won’t get paid for! He can only be real himself, and not make this a joke, and not bow to the sudden impulse (not entirely his own) to charm her, staying just a little bit detached like his friends have been trying to teach him to do. He’s always too ready to fall in love, so they’re always trying to catch him.

Darcy doesn’t deserve him trying to be anybody else. Because he isn’t her husband the real estate agent, he’s just a man with a crush and a really insane work assignment.

“Ok,” she says, looking him right in the eye and giving him this oddly-timed, reassuring little nod, like she’s about to hold his hand through a lip piercing (stupid, stupid, stupid College Jimmy) rather than grant him the great joy of having his pants removed by someone he would reductively and ineloquently call _hot_.

She pulls them down to his thighs and he takes over, reaching deep into the blankets to yank the pants the rest of the way off his legs. It seems like it would be the world’s douchiest magic trick to hold them up, suddenly in his hand, so he kicks them to the bottom of the bed.

He’s hovering over her, naked and awaiting his cue—briefly a true character of _WandaVision_ —and Darcy bridges the awkward moment by saying, “You know, studies suggest that married men live longer than single ones.”

For the shortest part of a second (she probably knows what that is), Jimmy loves his wife. Then he blinks and grins and is just incredibly attracted to his colleague, his partner on this mission.

“And they’re better in bed,” he quips as her knees come up to hold his hips between them.

“Do they say that?”

“I don’t know, but hopefully you will after this.”

She hums to allow the possibility and he kisses over the hum, lightly, as he strokes the head of his cock between her legs. Up, down, in with a snug slide that sends Darcy’s fingers into the dips of his flexing back muscles. He clenches everything up so he won’t let everything go.

On the first quick, short thrust, he sighs. She feels outstanding and he feels as sensitive to it as he felt to the world the time he unintentionally got stoned on prescription pain meds (for the lip piercing— _stupid_ ). Darcy lifts her legs, not encircling him, but perching her calves against his hips. He pulls out slow and sinks deep. She cups his face and cranes up to kiss him; supporting the back of her neck, he goes down to her, his whole body following to pin her to the bed.

It’s hotter like this, sweatier, but her legs twitch when he thrusts, his hips grinding against hers with the motion. Jimmy strokes forward and back, building gradually, until he’s panting into Darcy’s neck and her arms are wrapped greedily around him, right below his armpits. _Thump. Thump. Thump_. The bed into the wall. She grabs his ass and pulls him into her hard, voice breaking as she says, “Right there.”

Keeping up with his hips, he fumbles to get a hand between them, touching her the way he did before. In less than a minute, Darcy’s straining, pushing back with her hips, all the effort finally leaving her in a wordless gasp. He hugs her to him and comes, face pressed to her breast. A shudder passes between them. Jimmy can’t tell whether he’s hearing or feeling the thud of her racing heart, but it’s one of the two. Wow. He doesn’t want to get up.

When he does pull out, he watches her face carefully in the dimness of the room. But Darcy appears nothing but content. If anything, she’s looking at him like she doesn’t want him to go, so he drops down right next to her and puts an arm around her to ensure she’s fit as close to him as she can get.

“All these years,” she says, “and we’ve still got our spark.”

Jimmy chuckles.

“How do you feel?” she asks.

He’s about to babble out the obvious answer when he realizes there’s something he _doesn’t_ feel—the low-level but constant influence in the back of his mind that only relaxed earlier the more he came onto Darcy. Did sleeping together satisfy it? For now or for good? Or did it just clock out earlier, powering down for the night or something? Gee, he really needs Darcy to help him better understand the scientific side of what’s going on here.

Unwilling to trouble her with his possibly unfounded worries (maybe the influence _is_ still there and it’s him who’s feeling too satisfied to immediately notice), Jimmy responds with a lingering kiss. Darcy pulls back with a smile, finds his pajama shirt, and pads to the en suite bathroom.

He rolls onto his back, arm folded between his head and his pillow to prop him up a little while he thinks. He doesn’t get very far, too reluctant to disturb his post-orgasm bliss, and then Darcy returns. She wavers next to the bed and Jimmy looks at her questioningly. Like a decision’s been made, she meets his eyes with steady certainty and lets his pajama shirt fall to the bedroom floor. His gaze slides over her and he’s eagerly flipping the bedding back as her knee rises to crawl in with him.

He’s back to feeling like a younger version of himself, ready to go again without foreplay, without any conversation. This time, the sex is rough and fast, working Darcy back and forth over his lap until she reaches for the headboard for leverage and _really_ turns him inside out. He groans and grips her thighs as her hair sways up above. She scooped it together and draped it over her shoulder, but it’s out of control, it’s all out of control...

* * *

Jimmy sleeps deep and well. The bed’s warm and comfortable when he wakes up on his back, though he sees that Darcy’s already up when he turns his head to check her side of the mattress. He doesn’t have a bad feeling—there are faint morning noises come from somewhere else in the house—but after the bathroom, he dresses in only his bathrobe to start, wanting to check in with his partner before really getting ready for the day.

She’s in the kitchen when he walks in, self-consciously cinching his robe more tightly in case his appearance is too much of a reminder of last night. Darcy turns, clutching a bowl to her stomach as she stirs its contents, and smiles at him. She’s wearing an apron over her clothes.

“Waffles,” she announces.

“That sounds amazing. Thank you for doing this.”

Everything’s still black-and-white, but sunlight pours in strongly through the east-facing windows in the adjoining dining room, so their kitchen is bright and cheerful.

Darcy shrugs.

“We had the ingredients and a vintage waffle iron that I wanted to play around with. I signed up for the full _WandaVision_ experience.”

They look at each other a second too long and her gaze dips to the batter. Jimmy hopes she doesn’t feel weird about what happened between them. He definitely doesn’t regret a thing.

“I’ll be back to set the table in a minute, but, uh, I’m not dressed yet,” he says, stating the obvious. “So, I’m going to go do that.”

“If you must,” she sighs, turning to put the bowl back on the counter. A small laugh escapes him and he goes to leave, but Darcy says, “Whoa, whoa, just a minute there.”

When Jimmy looks at her, she angles her head to present her cheek and taps a finger against it. She wants a morning kiss. He’s so relieved that he crosses to her and aims for her mouth instead.

“There it is,” Darcy says when he draws back. She gives the tie of his robe a tug—not enough to undo it, just to be playful. “Good morning to you too.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _Everybody moving around/Acting like nothing had changed/But something had changed in me_ \- "Goodmorning," Bleachers

Making coffee here is a whole thing. The Keurig-pod squad back at the base would not be able to handle the process of measuring the ratio of grounds to water, doubtfully clicking buttons that seem very imprecise, and then waiting ages for it to percolate. Darcy likes the tedium. She likes controlling each step and she likes the extra time it gives her to take a shower while she waits.

She uses the main bathroom off the hall, not the en suite, because Jimmy’s probably still asleep. He was when she got up. Looking a little too long, she smiled at his soft expression and the equally soft dishevelment of his hair, whatever had slicked it down the day before worn off on the pillowcase and, probably, her hands. Doing the coffee redirected her focus, but in the shower, the hot water at her back reminds her of being wrapped up in his arms and soon her foot is braced on the edge of the bathtub as she strives to replicate how he touched her the night before. Shuddering, it seems like such a mistake not to have done this in the en suite’s shower after all. Maybe Jimmy would’ve heard her. Maybe he would’ve drowsily submitted to his FBI instincts and gone into the bathroom to investigate. Maybe these could’ve been his hands for _real_.

Darcy peaks and quickly gets out of the shower. There’s hot coffee and an eventual conversation with the star of her recent fantasy ahead of her. She takes a towel to her hair, wringing and tousling, but the memory of the fussy beehive hairdo stops her from doing more for now. _That_ is not happening today. Instead, she goes to the walk-in closet and finds herself a top and some ankle-length pants in shades of grey that _bizarrely_ strike her as going well together. She blinks. Nope, everything’s still grey, it must just be a feeling telling her that these pieces won’t clash horribly. Picking a dress would probably mean trusting her fashion sense more—but distrusting herself around Jimmy because of it would cancel that out. The nightgown is a cautionary tale; Darcy can’t make it too easy for herself again. They have work to do today.

Watching Wanda complete domestic tasks in the ’50s episode, she felt more scornful than she probably should have. Taking care of your family is a noble thing to do, she was just automatically braced for the pushy this-is-the-woman’s-place vibe. Tackling breakfast feels like a good way to give Wanda’s homemaker lifestyle the benefit of the doubt. (Though, while Darcy locates everything she needs for her grandpa’s killer waffle recipe, she still hopes to see Wanda branching out a little as the episodes go on.)

The morning tableau gets much more convincing when Jimmy walks in. Her heart does a goofy flop in her chest at the sight of him, all domestic in his bathrobe and slippers. The mister to her missus. She thinks the best-case scenario for this exchange will be getting him to play along with a peck on her cheek, but apparently, she was aiming too low. He kisses her with conviction and she does her best to act cool until he leaves to get dressed.

When she hears the noise of the shower, she forces herself to try to recall the first set of Hex-feedback readings she took at the base, herding her attention away from thoughts of wet, naked man.

Their dynamic over breakfast is… tough to pin down. They sit across from each other at the dining room table, serving plate piled with waffles in the middle, which seems like an impersonal, conference room-y setup to Darcy. But then Jimmy does things like tracing the bones in the back of her hand when she reaches for the butter, and kissing her temple when he rises and comes around the table to pour her a glass of orange juice. She feels a little dizzy over the absentminded affection.

Aside from the breakfast materials in the center of the table, they also both have a pad of paper at their elbow. While chewing, Darcy jots down questions and theories that pop into her head and when she glances across at Jimmy, sees him apparently doing the same. Hayward never gave them a strict timeline. Nevertheless, based on the short amount of time she had to form an impression of him, he seems like the kind of guy (asshole) to want things done _now_. He also doesn’t seem like he’d want them to leave Westview without Captain Rambeau. Darcy is absolutely in agreement with the no-one-left-behind policy, but she knows that she and Jimmy can’t afford to be hasty. They’ll need to be thoughtful, subtle, because she doesn’t trust the Hex not to pull some wacky shit. Well, _wackier_ shit.

They check in with each other and swap notes; Darcy’s able to answer some of Jimmy’s questions and he _adds_ questions to several of her theories. Helpful questions, ones she hasn’t thought of. He really is very… confidence-inspiring. He doesn’t pretend to have answers, but his energy and focus tell her he can get them there. Although she would’ve believed it even if he were still just wearing the bathrobe, the shirt and tie do provide a certain amount of assurance. This is a careful, thorough man.

She stares at him while he writes and wonders if he realizes they didn’t use condoms last night.

Darcy, normally fastidious about safe sex, somehow completely forgot about making sure Jimmy wrapped it up. It is so, so lame to say they just got caught up in what was happening and protection slipped their minds, but yes, that’s what happened! At least, she knows it slipped _her_ mind and she’s hoping it was the same for Jimmy. That he didn’t intentionally skip the condom. She can’t think that he would—he’s not some sleazy teenager, he’s a middle-aged FBI agent—but maybe she should ask. Just in case anything were to happen between them again. So they know the expectation going forward.

Laying her knife and fork across her plate, Darcy taps her foot against his under the table and pipes up.

“Which _Scooby-Doo_ character would you be?” is the question that leaves her mouth. Woops.

“Huh.” Jimmy narrows his eyes as he thinks. “Velma.”

“Really?”

“Well, we’re both people who look at the evidence that’s been gathered and figure out how the clues work together. Also, my mom definitely cut my hair like that until I was old enough to have a say.” He waves his fork to imply the passage of time. “And then for another two years because she’d tell me I was her handsome little guy and I caved to the flattery. Still do.”

Darcy laughs before pointing at herself and saying, “Fred.”

“Interesting.”

“I know. You’d think it’d be the opposite, right? The two of us?”

“You and Velma do have the glasses in common,” Jimmy observes, “but out of you and me, I’m the one more likely to unironically say ‘Jinkies.’”

“Honestly, I’m surprised you haven’t already.”

“Well, keep your ears open. It’s only a matter of time.”

She starts clearing the dishes and, immediately, he’s up helping her. It’s all good, clean, innocent teamwork until her counter-clockwise circuit of the dining room table aligns with his clockwise one and his hips press against her ass as he goes to grab the bottle of corn syrup. She gasps, feeling him lean into her harder for a second, but then he’s stepping back and she’s straightening up. Nothing happened! Yay, lying to themselves! Delusion is popular; everybody in Westview’s doing it. Fine, not by choice, but Darcy can clean up after breakfast with a smile like she eats, sleeps, and breathes this wholesome shit. Like the most satisfying moment of the last eight hours was making a swell batch of waffles and not riding Agent Woo until his expression said he was seeing the face of god. No, no, she can _totally_ be family-friendly sitcom material.

While she does her hair in the main bathroom, she regroups. Ideally, she’d just let it keep air-drying, but I-woke-up-like-this isn’t really a low-profile option in the decade of bumps, flips, and Jackie O. Compromising, Darcy pulls the upper portion of her hair back, loosening the top to create some volume. She twists the length of her hair in her hands and lays it forward over her shoulder, hoping to inspire the loose, natural curl it sometimes takes on. There, that seems like she’s put effort in, right? She frowns at the mirror, then delves into the cache of makeup stored in the vanity’s drawer. Thankfully, _WandaVision_ Darcy is apparently also down with red lipstick. Unless this is brown. Dark purple? Hopefully not black (hello, high-school Goth phase). God, this unending greyscale world. She applies it anyway before going ham on the mascara. This is the age of Twiggy. Besides, dramatic eyelashes will distract people from her slacker hairdo.

Jimmy really doesn’t play fair. Darcy grabs a coat, bag, and shoes and goes to the living room to find him sitting on the arm of the sofa, suit jacket slung over his arm, hat tilted just so on his head, reading the goddamn morning paper with the casual grace of a Leyendecker illustration.

“Paperboy come by?” she asks, jerking her chin to indicate the pages in his hands.

He looks up with an easy smile.

“Must’ve. I popped my head out the door and found this on our front step. Milk bottles too. I put those in the fridge.”

“My husband is handsome _and_ smart,” Darcy teases, going to the door.

“Don’t think I don’t hear you making fun of me just because you also called me handsome.”

“See? A dumb husband wouldn’t have picked up on that. Come on,” she says as her fingers grip the handle, “let’s get this show on the road. Literal show—” she emphasizes, gesturing between them, then jerks her head to suggest the street outside. “—literal road.”

“Check this out first.” Jimmy stands and approaches her, folding the paper open to the page he was on.

“‘For the children,’” Darcy reads aloud.

It’s the headline of an article about some local event happening that same evening, judging by the (incorrect) date at the top of the page.

“Might be a good place to look for Captain Rambeau,” he says, “if we don’t manage to locate her sooner.”

“Definitely.” She skims the rest of the writeup. “They make this thing sound all swanky and exclusive—they sold tickets!—but it’s being held in a public space. Snobs.”

“That’s good for us. We’ll be able to just mosey past and take a look.”

“‘Mosey.’”

Jimmy sighs heavily before abandoning the paper and letting her gleefully sling her arm through his, leading him out of the house.

* * *

They begin their day driving around a little and Darcy’s never felt so much like Vision. Not Vision as the world knows him, with the cape and the flying and the Mind Stone set into his forehead, but Vision in the opening sequence of _WandaVision_ ’s ’50s episode. Specifically, the part where he slides his hat down to hide his face while driving. She isn’t driving and she doesn’t have a hat, but she rests her face in her hand a bunch of different ways, going for incognito while she scans the scenery (and the faces of their fellow Westviewers).

Darcy doesn’t know which day of the week this is supposed to be. Can a husband and wife just go for a leisurely cruise through town on a weekday? Will people wonder why Jimmy isn’t in an office somewhere? Is she being paranoid in her expectation that everyone around them thinks they’re behaving strangely? Something is just _off_. Ok, a lot’s off, this whole situation is off, but staying in last night smoothed the blunt edge of the weirdness of the world inside the Hex. They were there long enough for the house to begin feeling familiar and relatively safe—the way Darcy is quick to adapt to hotels of average niceness while on vacation. Not that the rigors of earning her doctorate and treading water in the Sea of Surviving Day by Day provided a lot of time or extra energy to blow on a holiday.

Jimmy seems alright. He seems adaptable. She’d bet he wasn’t Snapped because an attitude _that_ positive can only be the result of years of plastering a smile on your face to be the friend/family member who comforts everyone who’s left. Watching him behind the wheel, she sighs, then pretends the sound came from her effort to roll down her window by hand. It’s a little too breezy in the car now, but she’s committed to her deception. She huffs, cupping her chin.

When they don’t have any success after a half-hour of drive-by surveillance, they decide to pound pavement. Jimmy parks on the main street of Westview’s quaint downtown. Darcy sits in the car for an extra few seconds as he gets out and shuts his door, making his way around to her side. She tries to breathe evenly. She has to play the part now, act like they’re married, and not just as a joke delivered with the intention of getting herself laid. There’s the mission of extracting Captain Rambeau to think of, plus their own safety.

Jimmy opens the door for her and she looks up at him.

“Shall we?”

He puts his hand out. She takes it.

Being out and about gets steadily less stressful. No one really seems to care about them, let alone suspect them of not belonging there. People say hello—Darcy even has a brief chat with the guy who bags her veggies when she stops in to do a sweep of the grocery store—but it’s always quick and friendly. For a while, she’s too afraid of blowing their cover to hazard touching Jimmy at all, but eventually, she sneaks her hand around his arm and he helpfully crooks his elbow for her, shooting her a warm smile. That helps.

“Hey,” she says as they pass an appliance store, “as seen on TV.” She points to a Stark Industries toaster in the window display.

“That’s the one from the ad?”

“Uh huh. I mean—” Darcy clears her throat and raises her voice for the benefit of shoppers passing them on the sidewalk. “—I believe so, darling. Doesn’t it look, uh, crackerjack?”

Jimmy inclines his head to bring his mouth to her ear. She tenses, anticipating news that he just spotted Monica, but he murmurs, “‘Crackerjack.’”

She rolls her eyes at him as he draws back.

“I said it for cover.”

“You still said it.”

Darcy’s about to insist he cut her some slack—she did make waffles for breakfast, after all—when _she_ spots the Captain. She grips Jimmy’s arm and angles him slightly, trying to communicate with her eyes that he needs to look at the bench across the street. Monica’s seated on it, apparently waiting for a bus. A bus that is _coming_ , Darcy sees, glancing down the street.

“If we lose her now, finding her again is gonna be a pain in the ass,” she hisses.

But she doesn’t have to tell her partner twice because he’s unbending his arm to clasp her hand instead, pulling her into the street after him when there’s a gap in the lazy stream of cars. He did look both ways first. Knowing him the little she does, she would have expected nothing less.

Darcy tries to make herself extra sweet and harmless as they hurry towards the bench. She’s attempting to channel television’s mid-century leading ladies (and every smiling female citizen they’ve encountered today), wanting to seem as nonthreatening as possible in case Captain Rambeau’s operating on the same worrying wavelength as the rest of the people in this town.

“Hello,” Jimmy says carefully, smiling and stepping into the Captain’s line of sight. At his side, Darcy offers a nervous wave.

Monica darts a quick look to the side, then gives them a tentative smile in return.

“Good morning.”

“Shit,” Darcy mutters as the city bus lurches to the curb. “Shit. _Shit_.”

She sort of wants to jump in front of Captain Rambeau and not let her board this bus, but she’s also aware that she can’t make a scene. Making a scene would probably mean no more chances and they’ll _need_ those if the scene doesn’t prevent Monica from catching the bus.

“Oh,” says a voice full of surprise. “Geraldine, I didn’t realize you knew anyone in town!”

Darcy and Jimmy turn in unison to find Wanda’s neighbour disembarking. Monica/Geraldine rises from her bench, but she doesn’t move to catch the bus before its door swings shut. That’s good, but Darcy still feels… not right.

“Yes,” she babbles before she can think too much about it. “We, uh, she’s a familiar face to us.”

God, that didn’t make any damn sense and Agnes is cocking her head slightly to reflect that, even as she smiles. She’s just one of the citizens though, and Darcy and Jimmy belong here. She should accept them as readily as whatshername with the dog did yesterday.

“Next-door neighbours maybe?” Agnes guesses. She turns her attention to Captain Rambeau and Darcy relaxes for a second. “Where is it that you live again, Geraldine? It’s completely slipped my mind.”

“She’s staying with us,” Jimmy cuts in quickly. “She was. She has been. Until the sale of her new house went through. I’m her real estate agent.”

In a move that leaves Darcy blinking, he magics a business card out of the air and offers it to Agnes.

“That’s quite a trick!” she praises, accepting the card and looking it over. “James Woo. And who’s this? Your associate?”

She’s looking at Darcy, who’s suddenly as empty of words as she was before she learned to talk (which was early), but her _husband_ takes the lead on this one, wrapping an arm around her waist. She does her best to lean naturally into his side.

“This is my wife, Darcy Woo. I had to meet with Mo-Geraldine this morning and Darcy is always able to offer helpful insights.”

“You help your husband with his job?”

Agnes looks at her with politely raised eyebrows. It’s an innocent question and Darcy knows she should be calm, but even this feels like an interrogation after the rest of the populous not giving a shit about their presence. It’s stressful just to be looked at.

“You might say I have a talent for reading the atmosphere. Of a home,” she adds quickly.

“Yes,” Monica contributes, speaking up for the first time since she greeted them. “The atmosphere was very important to me. There are plenty of options anymore for a place with two bathrooms and a sunken seating area in the living room, but the feel of the place can really set it apart.”

_Thank god she’s playing along_ , Darcy thinks. Then she thinks, Is _she playing along, or is the Hex making her believe that she actually purchased a home with the assistance of Mr. and Mrs. Woo?_

“Oh, sure,” Agnes says. “Well, alright. I suppose I’ll see you at Dottie’s later on, then the event this evening.”

Darcy feels a little snubbed because it’s kinda high-school of Agnes to, like, mention a party in front of people who weren’t invited, but then she remembers that she doesn’t have to care. She and Jimmy won’t need to be at that ‘For the Children’ thing because they’ve already found Monica! Success! Celebratory martinis for all!

Agnes starts to leave, then swivels, wearing a confused frown. She points between Darcy and Jimmy.

“Say, you two wouldn’t happen to know Wanda, would you?”

_Fuck_ , Darcy thinks. Does Wanda have some sort of game of telepathic telephone going at all times? Are the Westviewers somehow passing info down the line about two strangers wandering the downtown?

“Wanda?” she asks. “Nope, never met a Wanda.”

“And you’re not here to meet her?”

“Just a routine, uh, real estate checkup with Geraldine here.”

“Good then!” Agnes says brightly. “So nice meeting you, Mr. and Mrs. Woo!”

“That was weird,” Jimmy concludes as they watch her walk away.

Darcy’s nodding, but it isn’t her who says, “Believe me, James, you have no idea.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _’Cause the more I get to know you/Well, the more I feel I knew you/In a lifetime a long time ago_ \- "Old Soul," Saint Motel

Jimmy’s about ready to toss his hat into the air victoriously when Monica backtracks.

“Sorry,” she says with a sheepish smile. “It was James, wasn’t it? Don’t know why I didn’t say ‘Mr. Woo.’”

Darcy steps closer to her and Jimmy lets his hand slide across her back. He doesn’t remove it because he’s trying to block what’s going on a little bit, in case anybody’s watching.

“You don’t know us?” Darcy asks in a lowered, urgent voice. “Or just Jimmy actually. I know you, but you wouldn’t know me. It’s kind of a one-sided thing. Big fan.”

He watches Monica’s eyes widen with confusion and/or alarm.

“I thought I did… maybe… for a minute there,” she says.

“Alrighty,” Jimmy intercedes in a calming tone. “Would you have a few spare minutes available to speak with us? Someplace a little quieter?”

If it were him, he’d be crazy suspicious over people approaching him on the street and trying to convince him to go with them to a less public location. From what he knows of Captain Rambeau’s professional background, this should be a hard sell, but she’s nodding. He appreciates her trust while worrying over her seemingly uncharacteristic behaviour.

“There’s a park right up the street,” she suggests, pointing. As they begin to walk in that direction, leaving the bus stop behind, she adds, “I’m Monica Rambeau.”

“No, you’re not,” Jimmy blurts.

Monica looks troubled.

“That’s right, I’m… I’m Geraldine.”

“That is what the nice lady called you,” Darcy jokes gently, walking on his other side.

“She’s not so nice,” Monica informs them. “I don’t think she likes me very much.”

They’re in some kind of stylized approximation of the past, but it’s still small-town America. It doesn’t seem impossible to Jimmy that Agnes might be racist. It’s certainly more likely than his other theory for why Agnes would treat Monica with distrust: the Hex is like the dreams in _Inception_ and Wanda’s dream people (her characters) have recognized someone who’s not supposed to be here. In that theory, they’ll gradually grow more hostile, and then attack. Hmm, actually, that’s pretty much the progression of every racially-motivated hate crime he’s ever investigated.

Monica/Geraldine seems slightly shaken by the time the three of them park themselves at an empty picnic table in the sun. She doesn’t flinch when Darcy pats her arm though.

“What do you think?” his wife asks him. “I’ll follow your lead.”

He nods, then turns his attention to the Captain. He’ll go with the truth.

“You _are_ Monica,” he says. “Captain Monica Rambeau of S.W.O.R.D. You and I met two days ago—maybe three, time in here is funny…”

That thought distracts him and he looks to Darcy again.

“Does the morning feel really long to you? I swear the sun has barely moved.”

“Yeah, I was thinking that too,” she confirms. “I can’t tell if time just seems to pass more slowly now that we’re in here because what we saw on the TV before we came in was a twenty-ish-minute episode. Being inside the Hex, we have to live every minute of the in-between bits that Wanda—or whatever—edits out to focus on the stars and just show the action and character development scenes. Mainly, I know I’m somehow already tired.”

“You are… familiar,” Monica says carefully. Jimmy studies her expression hopefully.

“We were investigating all this,” he reminds her, “and then you got pulled in. I think you touched the barrier. That was after it swallowed up your drone.”

“What’s a drone?”

“Ok,” Darcy cuts in. “So, we’re not totally there yet with the mental breakthrough. We don’t need to rush. If you trust us enough, Captain, you could come back to our place?”

“I was going somewhere…”

“Yeah, you almost got on that bus. Good thing you didn’t because we don’t know where you were headed and we would’ve had to—”

“Wanda’s. I was going to Wanda’s,” Monica repeats with certainty.

Jimmy exchanges a glance with Darcy.

“You know Wanda?” he asks Monica cautiously.

“No… I don’t think… I’m not sure…”

She rests her elbows on the table and clasps her hands together, pressing her knuckles into her chin. Looks to Jimmy like she’s trying to get a grip on herself. The right self. It seems like she’s being tugged between her real self and the character of Geraldine. Reminds him of how he’s been ping-ponging between his regular method of interacting with women he’s interested in and the bolder impulses that culminated in the previous night’s activities with his pretend wife. Maybe everyone who chooses to come in from the outside gets torn in two in a way, and sometimes the purposes of both align?

He and Darcy can talk that thought through later. Right now, he needs to bring Monica in. First the house as a halfway point (more neutral than being around other citizens who could interfere to make her doubt the real identity he and Darcy are working to bring to the surface), then back through the Hex to S.W.O.R.D.’s base on the other side.

“Well, if you come back with us to the house we’re working out of, we can tell you what _we_ know about Wanda. And this… situation.”

“Spoiler alert,” Darcy chimes in, “what we know about this situation is not a lot, but you could really help us with that.”

“Help you,” Monica repeats thoughtfully. “No, I’m here to help Wanda.”

“Great, yes, us too,” Jimmy promises. “That’s the larger goal. First, we need to get you out of Westview. Once you’re secure, you can debrief and—”

“Leave Westview?” A hazy, benign expression appears on her face and she laughs in light disbelief. Not good. “I’m afraid I can’t do that. I have a committee meeting I have to be at this afternoon and if you knew Dottie… oh boy, that one is a stickler for attendance!”

“What’s the meeting for?”

“Making contact with Wanda. Gaining her trust.”

From the sudden focus on her face, Jimmy has a diluted version of Monica back. She has clear goals. She’s not looking at him like they know each other though, just like they’re sharing information. On some level, she seems to trust him.

“That is a good opportunity,” Darcy says begrudgingly. She notices Jimmy looking at her (he can feel the disapproving frown on his face) and says, “What? It is. If they’ve never met before, it’s not like Monica can knock on her door and get invited in. A group setting gives her access. She can befriend Wanda.”

“You don’t know that that’ll work,” Jimmy argues, glancing quickly from Darcy to Monica.

“Sure it will. Agnes is a busybody with no boundaries and this Dottie woman sounds like she’s about as much fun as a drill sergeant. With options like those, who wouldn’t gravitate towards Geraldine?”

Monica smiles winningly. It only makes him more apprehensive.

“Sounds like we need a compromise,” he says. “How about discussing this further at our place? If we can figure out a way to execute this plan safely, the _three of us_ can go to Dottie’s house together.”

“No.” Monica’s no longer smiling. It’s as though her real self has emerged all of a sudden. Abruptly, she gets to her feet. “I need to stay focused. Wanda is at the center of all this. Getting me out of here won’t change that, it’ll only eliminate our best shot.”

“Wanda is also the one messing with your head though, isn’t she?” Darcy guesses, rising as well. “Aren’t you worried that getting closer to her will make you… less you?”

“I have to be here to help her. She doesn’t have anybody else to get her through this.”

“ _WandaVision_?”

“Her grief,” Monica explains. “I had… I wasn’t… Look, recently, I found out that the person I love most in the world died. I wasn’t around for that. There’s one other person who would’ve genuinely cared enough to be and I have no way to find out if she was. My mo— this _person_ might have been alone. Afraid.” She lifts her chin as her eyes get shiny. “In pain. Loss is a different kind of pain, but Wanda and I share that. I can’t leave her on her own.”

Jimmy takes a deep breath, then nods.

“I understand.” With a flick, he produces another business card. “Do you have a pen? I’ll write down our address for you and maybe you’ll feel like meeting up with us later.”

Monica opens her handbag and passes him a pen. He flips the card over and scrawls across the back, under Darcy’s watchful eye.

“Dude, are all these business cards up your sleeve? How many are in there? What’s up with the magic trick?”

For now, he just grins at her briefly before handing the pen and the card to Monica.

“If we don’t hear from you,” he warns as she takes the items, “we will have to assume that Wanda’s influence is interfering and we’ll come looking for you. The plan is for all three of us to get out of here together.”

“Your plan,” Monica says, but her tone’s a little wry. She’s still herself for the moment.

“Can we give you a ride at least?” Darcy asks. “Since we made you miss your bus?”

“Maybe not right to Dottie’s…”

“I can drop you off a block away,” Jimmy says. “We’ll check for civilians before you get out of the car, monitor you until you’re inside.”

“Yeah, Jimmy’ll FBI the hell out of it,” Darcy says.

He raises his eyebrows at her.

“Thanks for the endorsement.”

“Anytime, babe. And,” she says, turning to Monica, “you tell us if you feel your identity start slipping on the way there. We don’t want to scare Geraldine by making her think she’s being kidnapped or anything.”

Jimmy thinks that’s a darn good suggestion and he’s happy to see Monica nod to it, though she doesn’t look thrilled to do it. Probably the reminder that she isn’t totally in control of herself. Yeah, they gotta start a club for that. Monica can be the president if she wants, as far as he’s concerned.

On the way to the car, Darcy chats Monica up while Jimmy walks behind them, staying vigilant about their surroundings. He’s not sure whether Darcy’s so talkative because it’s just who she is, or if she’s attempting to cement her status as Friend as firmly as possible in Monica’s mind while she has agency. Either way, it’s good to see. It’s actually just really nice watching her smile. He gets a dopey one of his own on his face as he looks at her. He wants to run his fingers through the cascading charcoal of her hair, or offer her his arm to grasp again, or stop her just to kiss her on the cheek. Touch her—that’s what he wants to do.

The most he can do right now is brush a hand across Darcy’s back as he holds the door to the back seat open for her. She offered Monica the front as their guest, but Jimmy wonders if there’s more than one reason when he lifts his eyes to the rear-view mirror and sees Darcy stretching her legs out across the seat. Is she tired? They’ve walked some distance today, but not far. Did she hurt herself? A twisted ankle or a bumped knee while he wasn’t watching? She doesn’t say anything though, so he pulls away from the curb.

It turns out that Monica doesn’t know where Dottie’s house is. Or rather she _didn’t_ know where it was, but as they start to lose Monica to Geraldine (who’s thankfully unalarmed to be given a lift by her real estate agent and his wife), the directions come. Jimmy easily navigates the subdivision. When he parks to let her out, Monica is a polite passenger and nothing more. Darcy’s obviously aware of this as well and cleverly reminds Monica of the address in her handbag by recommending she use it to come to their house for dinner. Although they don’t get a firm answer, Monica doesn’t hurry away from the car like she thinks they’re serial killers or anything.

“You wanna come sit up here now?” Jimmy asks, bracing his hand on the passenger seat’s headrest as he looks back at Darcy.

“On your lap?” She smiles slyly and he feels his face warm.

“In the passenger seat.”

“Boooring,” she says. “Besides, I can watch Monica get into the house better through the back window. On second thought…”

Swiftly, Darcy opens her door, slams it shut, and gets into the front seat instead.

“Hey.”

“Hi,” Jimmy says, confused.

“Agnes is coming.”

“What? Where?”

They just met, so she’ll definitely remember them. And she’s nosy. They don’t need her connecting them being parked here to Monica being at Dottie’s.

“Towards us, but on the other side of the street. Just look at me,” Darcy commands, and Jimmy does. He looks at the retro shape of her glasses and her signature dark lipstick. “Good. Ok, don’t look away. I’ll let you know when she’s gone.”

She’s looking past him, spying on Agnes around him, and Jimmy reaches out without thinking about it, lightly gripping her chin and adjusting her head so she’s looking at him instead. Her gaze darts after Agnes.

“I need to—”

“So do I,” Jimmy assures her, angling towards the passenger seat to kiss his wife. He keeps it brief because he senses she’ll want to say something.

“If movies have taught me anything,” Darcy informs him, “it’s that making out to avoid detection _always_ works.”

She cups his face and kisses him back. He’s not sure if her assertion really holds water, but with the soft pressure of her mouth on his, he has no problem supporting her on a lesson well learned. Slipping a hand beneath her hair, he holds the back of her neck and tilts his head more. His lips part at the wet touch of her tongue. Their mouths work faster and Jimmy starts breathing harder, leaning eagerly towards Darcy when she lays her hand on his chest, then drops it to his thigh. Her fingers are creeping higher when he remembers they’re parked on a residential street at lunchtime. He slows the kisses and Darcy pulls back.

“You’re right,” she says, “Agnes is probably gone by now.”

“You wanna go grab lunch somewhere? Could be awhile before Monica’s ready to check in.”

“Sure. Let me just…”

Darcy clutches his leg again, using it for balance as she cranes to see herself in the rear-view mirror. With a practiced finger, she wipes at the smeared edges of her lipstick until the outline is clean and perfect. Meanwhile, Jimmy tries to laugh off the familiar way she’s touching him and ignore the stiffness in his pants. She drops back into her seat, smiles, and he drives them to lunch.

They eat at a crowded little place off the main street. With too many people around, neither of them bring up Monica. He thinks Darcy’s worrying about it though; she’s excited about her cheeseburger until it arrives, then she hardly touches it. She doesn’t want coffee either. Jimmy takes her hand and smiles when she meets his eye. He does his best to take her mind off the mission for now by doing his close-up magic trick with sugar packets.

“You want to see a real magic trick?” Darcy asks when she’s brightened up again. “Ta-da!”

She flashes the inside of her purse at him, displaying the edges of bills poking out of a wallet.

“I guess lunch is on the Hex,” Jimmy says.

He’s relieved because he’d forgotten to be worried about having money. With all the time they’ve spent around town today, he let his guard down to the charming familiarity of Westview. When he got ready this morning, he found a wallet embossed with ‘J.W.’—it made him grin, imagining it as a birthday present from Darcy—and stuck it in his back pocket out of habit. He’s tempted to check it now, but the two of them sitting here, ecstatic over being able to pay for their meal, would probably attract attention.

“It’s been calling out to me,” Darcy explains as she leaves bills on the table and they head out, “begging to be spent, but what’s the point in buying anything other than food? I don’t know if we’ll be able to take anything back out of the Hex with us.”

Jimmy gets the door and is holding it open for her when she halts just before the threshold.

“Calling out,” she mumbles.

“What?”

He gives the people walking past on the sidewalk a friendly nod, then concentrates on Darcy again, not wanting to rush her right out of whatever brainwave she’s just experienced. Her eyes leap to his.

“I have an idea.”

On their way back to the house, Darcy explains how hamstrung they were at the S.W.O.R.D. base, unable to do much besides speculate on the Hex’s inner workings. Now that they’re here, and planning to be here a little longer while they wait for Monica to work on her own approach, they might as well use their extra time wisely. They need to focus on communication, Darcy tells him. The extent of the trials before the two of them entered the Hex was S.W.O.R.D. agents flying in drone after drone, watching them all disappear, only to receive zero data transmission. Inside, she suggests that things should be simpler.

“So we just call Monica up at Dottie’s to check in?” Jimmy asks skeptically, pulling into their driveway. It sounds too easy.

“Or we get Wanda on the line. If Monica doesn’t want to leave Westview until Wanda’s willing to accept the help she’s offering, then we need to shift our attention to Wanda. Anything we can do to make her more receptive of Monica.”

He turns off the engine and twists to look at his partner.

“Like what though?”

“I’m not totally sure. Nothing too complex. We just need to break through this character she’s been turned into, like we did with Monica earlier.”

“Monica was willing to listen,” he points out. “There’s no guarantee that Wanda will be as amenable.”

“You can get through to her,” Darcy says firmly.

“Me?”

“Yeah, you. Obviously you. I came up with the method, but you’ll be better at doing the talking. Haven’t you ever dealt with a hostage situation?”

“Is that how we’re treating this?”

“I think so,” she says. “We haven’t tried to get out of the Hex yet, so we don’t know if we’re trapped in here, but Wanda must be at least trapped in her own mind.”

“Cripes.”

With that, they go inside. The rotary phone is in the living room, right by the entrance to the kitchen. As with the wallet, it’s a cinch for Jimmy to picture a little backstory for this object. He can see the receiver pressed between Darcy’s ear and shoulder while she has her hands full making waffles.

She checks for a dial tone, nods, then bends to search the drawer of the small table the phone sits on. She retrieves an address book.

“Is Dottie in there?” he asks anxiously. Darcy’s already flipping through.

“Dottie Jones,” she announces, showing him the page. “That’s probably her, right? Or the Hex is just needlessly screwing with us.”

“I’ll give it a whirl.”

He dials as Darcy looks on.

“Oh, good afternoon,” he says when a woman’s voice greets him. “I’m just trying to reach Wanda and was told she might be at your house. Sorry to bother you.”

He’s informed that it’s no bother in such a sweet tone that it’s clearly a lie, and something he’s probably supposed to realize is a lie. “Dottie,” he mouths to Darcy, confident in his assumption that that’s who he was speaking to.

“Is she getting Wanda?” Darcy asks.

Just as he’s starting to nod, Wanda’s “Hello?” is in his ear. It’s the first time he’s heard her speak, apart from watching WandaVision, but he recognizes her voice and clutches the receiver hard.

“Wanda? My name is Jimmy. I want to help you. Can you tell me what’s going on here? What are you doing in Westview? Is someone—”

“What?” Darcy demands when he abruptly stops speaking.

Jimmy sighs, replacing the receiver.

“She hung up.”


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _So please save all your questions for the end/And maybe I’ll be brave enough by then_ \- "Pancakes for Dinner," Lizzy McAlpine

Darcy is looking at a man without a mission. Since the phone call failure, Jimmy’s lost his pep. He’s still focused, still motivated, but he clearly doesn’t know where to direct it because he’s also trying not to step on the toes of Captain Monica Rambeau. Honestly, Darcy’s hoping they haven’t sabotaged Monica’s committee meeting already. She won’t say that to Jimmy and risk an even more deeply bummed-out attitude though.

“We can do downtime,” she says when he strides purposefully back into the living room from being holed up in the office. (He’s done this circuit a few times now.) “It’s easy. First, we need snacks. There are bound to be snacks in this house.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because in this little bubble alt-universe of ’60s Westview, I appear to be a housewife. The only thing I can imagine enjoying about that is the freedom to eat snacks all day.”

“You want me to look?”

“You _are_ up,” Darcy observes from her seat on the couch. Jimmy rolls his eyes before going into the kitchen.

“Anything specific you want me to look for?” he calls.

“A gourmet omelette.”

“What? An omelette’s not a snack. Snacks are ready to eat, they don’t require cooking.”

“Ugh,” she groans. “Fine. Then, ice cream. No, a pickle. Wait,” Darcy says. “The happy medium between the last two things: a peach.”

“How in the world is a peach a compromise between ice cream and a pickle?”

He comes out of the kitchen frowning, but he has a peach in his hand, nestled into a napkin. He hands it over as she gives him a grateful smile before biting into it.

“I’m not getting an answer then?” Jimmy asks dryly, sitting next to her. Darcy shrugs and chews. The peach is neither too firm nor too soft and it’s _delicious_. She needs to concentrate on eating, not talking. “Are we going to acknowledge that you don’t have a real answer or are we pretending that was some kind of brain teaser.”

She shrugs again. So enigmatic. Her fake husband rests his real arm along the back of the couch and she leans her head against it. After a few minutes have passed and not much peach remains, she’s ready for conversation.

“You wanna talk about it?” she asks.

“The peach thing? Ah, I’m over it.”

Darcy smiles at Jimmy’s profile as he stares stoically at the opposite wall.

“About the call not working out. You know we’ll think of something else. Or Monica’s plan won’t succeed either and she’ll give up and leave the Hex with us.”

“Monica’s not really the giving up kind.” He exhales heavily. “I’m just not used to sitting and waiting around.”

“I’m an expert at it. That’s, like, the main thing I do. Except while I’m doing that, I’m also researching or going back over data points or something. I feel a little at loose ends myself right now without my gear. Scientists do the questioning, but those questions have to be inspired by the stuff that tools let us look at. I’m sorta empty-handed.”

“I’m sorry,” Jimmy says. “I shouldn’t be complaining. I know this isn’t an easy situation for either of us.”

He slumps in his seat slightly and she wonders if she’s making him feel worse.

“Hey, uh, if you want to talk about an easy situation, how ’bout what happened last night? I noticed you’ve been touchy-feely today, so I’m assuming you’re good, but I still feel like it’s maybe this thing we aren’t addressing. What do you think?”

Taking a final bite of her peach, she balls the pit inside the napkin and sets it on the floor for now. She doesn’t want to walk out of the room when she’s finally brought this up ( _and_ caught Jimmy at a moment when he doesn’t have anything else he needs to focus on).

“Have I been too touchy-feely?” Immediately, he draws his arm back from behind her head.

“No, dude, I—”

“I know we hardly knew each other before we slept together, but on the other hand, there’s the Hex telling us we’re _married_ …”

“So it was… for show?” Darcy interprets. “You were just trying to stay in character.”

“No. But I admit that was going to be my excuse if you didn’t feel… if there wasn’t the same connection for you. I was touching you because I wanted to.”

“It is confusing. Having basically a one-night stand with someone but then, uh oh, you live with them and also you’re fake-married. If there’s a line somewhere in there,” she confesses, “I’m having a hard time finding it.”

“Me too,” Jimmy says, gently putting his arm back in position and tucking it around her shoulders.

“If only I had my instruments.” She shuffles closer on the cushion.

“I do have an idea for how we could get rid of some of the confusion.” He’s looking at her mouth. Always torturing her, staring straight at her damn mouth.

“Agent Woo, I am open to your proposal.”

“Well, Doctor…” Jimmy trails off when Darcy strokes a finger down his tie. His eyes flick up to hers. “What if it wasn’t a one-night stand?”

“That might retroactively justify the touchy-feeliness. Everything between the two… stands… was like foreplay.”

“Right.”

“We just hadn’t gotten it all out of our systems yet.”

“Exactly.”

“This seems like sound reasoning for the experiment.” She feels like a dork for pushing her glasses up in this moment, but they’re slipping on her bridge as she battles to keep returning her gaze to his face when his legs shifting closer to hers draws her eye.

“Or we could take things slow,” he says, thankfully sounding half-hearted about this option. “Because I do actually really like you, Darcy, and I don’t want to get lazy about dating just because we’re stuck in a supernatural, radioactive town and it’s more convenient to fall into bed together than to take you out on a date.”

“I appreciate the sentiment. Seriously. But believe me, nothing you did last night made me think, _This guy’s lazy_. Anyway, I bought you lunch, remember?”

Jimmy grins.

“Oh, _you_ bought it? You’re taking credit now?”

Smiling smugly to indicate that taking credit is exactly what she’s doing, she brings her face near his. There may be some eyelash batting.

“Yes. And I’m currently accepting shows of appreciation.”

After their back-and-forth, she thinks he’ll kiss her now. He does, but not where she expects him to—Jimmy sweeps her hair away from her neck and grazes his lips there. Her sigh of pleasure sounds loud for how light the touch is. His hand lands on her waist and grips when she pushes up from her seat, bringing a leg over his lap to straddle him. He looks up at her, smoothing her hair back, and her heart swivels around in her chest like it’s hula-hooping.

“We could be a thing,” Darcy thinks and says.

Jimmy nods, looking up at her. The afternoon sun is streaming through the front windows behind him. His face is romantically cinematic in shades of grey. Boy, she lucked out when Director Hayward decided to unofficially classify them both as expendable.

“I could see us being a thing,” he agrees.

His fingers trace along her jaw while she sits on his lap, taking her time unknotting his tie. She likes having something to do with her hands. She especially likes it when she doesn’t have anything to say, because there’s nothing else that needs to be said. Tie undone, Darcy slides it through Jimmy’s collar until the ends fall to an equal length against his shirt. She pats it in place and he moves his hand to the back of her head; he’s been waiting for her—patiently—and she’s ready now.

They made out urgently in the car. In their own home, the kissing’s less rushed and more thorough. Jimmy’s hands caress her face and neck, always readjusting like he’s looking for the best place to touch, the best way to hold her. She leans down into him and unhurriedly works the buttons of his dress shirt open. When she puts her hands half on his bare skin, half on his white undershirt, he tugs her hips forward. At the feel of him hardening against her, Darcy moans, lips buzzing on his. Jimmy breaks the kiss, panting. He keeps his eyes closed and she studies the dint of focus between his eyebrows.

“Darcy?”

“Bedroom,” she says softly.

She climbs off of Jimmy and he rises, placing his hand on her lower back to—she assumes—signal for her to go ahead of him, but her gaze drops and, suddenly, she’s looking at the bulge in the front of his pants, and then she’s covering it with her hand, and then she’s _stroking_ … And then his hand is on her ass, she’s whisking the tie from his collar to let it flutter to the floor, he’s pulling her shirt over her head and nearly knocking her glasses off. _Not on the couch_ , she remembers. Stupid, weird-shaped couch.

Darcy pulls Jimmy’s shirt, untucking the ends from his pants while also compelling him forward. Though they make it some distance to the bedroom, he has her pressed to the wall with his tongue in her mouth and his hand fit against the crotch of her pants before they’ve cleared the linen closet. She can smell a little of that clean-laundry scent when he rubs and she inhales hard through her nose. She shoves playfully at his chest and he backs away with a smile to strip off his undershirt. Walking backwards, she reaches for his hand and he gives it, letting her tow him into the bedroom.

He made the bed. She starts to _aww_ over how sweet that is—that he must’ve done it after getting up, while she was making waffles in the kitchen—but Jimmy steps close behind her and skims his hands up her stomach to her chest.

Darcy glances at him quickly over her shoulder and reaches back to unfasten her bra. He does nothing to impede its removal, kneading her breasts the second the bra is on the floor. She makes a small sound and tips her head back against him. Jimmy’s fingers close around her nipples, plucking as his hips nudge her ass. She undoes her pants and possibly bumps back into his erection on purpose. Thank you, Hex, Darcy’s got the could-be-accidental-but-it’s-obviously-not seduction techniques from here.

Turning to sit on the edge of the bed in her underwear, she slides Jimmy’s belt open. She can see his chest heaving before she lifts her eyes higher to let them dance with his. Unbuttoning his pants, Darcy leans forward to kiss above the high waist (appropriate for this fake period piece they’re living in). The overly-controlled way he gathers her hair back and holds her gaze makes her wonder if this guy, with his outdated phrases, ever swears.

She discovers the answer is a big yes when she drops his pants and underwear to the floor and licks across the head of his cock.

“ _Shit_ ,” Jimmy gasps.

Darcy grins in self-satisfaction and is about to put her mouth on him again when he takes her by the shoulders and guides her to lie back on the neat bedding. He folds himself over her, not on the bed, but kissing between her breasts. His damp breath and the knowledge of him standing over her naked make her have to squeeze her eyes shut for a minute as he hooks his fingers into the waist of her underwear and slides them down.

Feeling them pass her ankles, she springs up to grip the back of Jimmy’s neck just as he’s shifting to kiss her. Their mouths collide and she’s sure she’s trembling. The middle of the day? With the light seeping through the curtains? Totally exposed on top of the covers? She never does it like this. This has the distinct atmosphere of her husband coming home for a nooner before he has to go back to work, sneaky but also completely allowed, the two of them in their own bed. Mr. and Mrs. Woo getting up to things that’ll mess up his immaculately styled hair and make his real estate colleagues wonder what the hell he was doing on his lunch break.

He tears his mouth from hers and parts her thighs with his hands before he crouches and puts his lips and tongue there instead. Now Darcy’s swearing, which she’s sure is no surprise. When they passed through the barrier and she tested the crasser end of her vocabulary, she was hoping it was functional in case she needed to get colourful if she stubbed her toe or something. They knew there would be unforeseen circumstances. She thinks this qualifies; her hips are rocking against his mouth.

“Please,” she whines. “Please, please, _please_.”

Jimmy stands and runs a hand down the center of her body, neck to groin, then delicately lifts it to his face to wipe his mouth against the back. He doesn’t ask her to scoot farther back on the bed or even sit up before he lines up and sinks into her. Darcy’s back arches, hips rolling, and with his early, probing thrusts, they find that spot she’s desperate for him to hit.

The next quarter of an hour is so good, so steady—Jimmy looking down at her with that serious face until it turns pleading and she knows he’s close—that she clings to him when it’s over and they end up on the floor. Which is where they have sex again, his back against the bed and her in his lap, not long after. She’s exuberant and he’s ready with even less time in between than last night, so the Hex is probably still interfering there. Darcy’s just not real concerned right now.

He convinces her back onto the bed for the third round and by the fourth, they’re actually under the covers, her legs wrapped around him while he does his other patented Jimmy Woo magic trick of making himself disappear inside her while the headboard batters the wall.

Darcy has one of her legs out of the blankets, her head on his chest, and a pleasant loss of all concept of time in the minutes after things seem to have finally calmed down. The sun’s low. She’s not completely sure where her glasses ended up. She remembers that their clothes are scattered across the house. It makes her smile at the ceiling.

“I’ve never had sex that many times in a row,” Jimmy says on an exhale. “Not even in college.”

“Why do you say it like that? What kind of wild time were you having in college?”

Beneath her, he shakes with a laugh. This is nice, blissful.

Until Darcy rolls to kiss his shoulder and her body doesn’t move quite right, like she’s lying on his arm or his pants have gotten bunched up in the bed. She goes to feel around and her hand encounters her stomach where her stomach should not be.

“Uhhh,” she drones as she waits for her brain to kick in and make sense of this.

She flattens her hand and rubs it experimentally over the taut curve of her belly. She sits upright with a shriek.

“Gee willikers!” Jimmy bursts out, sitting up behind her. “What happened, Darcy?”

Breathing raggedly, she stares down at the bump. It looks like she’s holding the opening of one of their mixing bowls against her stomach. Except it’s not a mixing bowl.

“I’m pregnant.”

“Oh,” she hears Jimmy say heavily. “I didn’t know you were seeing somebody outside the Hex. Wow, I really gave into all this too easily… I never even asked if you had someone… Why didn’t you say—”

Darcy shifts and points aggressively at her suddenly-expanded belly.

“I’m pregnant _now_ ,” she says, voice climbing in panic. “As in, I wasn’t a minute ago, and now _look_!”

He blinks, staring at her stomach, then rolls away to turn on his bedside lamp.

“We didn’t use condoms,” he says softly, eyes fixed on her.

“Yeah, I know. We somehow forgot about that _again_ , even though I really meant to have that discussion with you after what happened last night. I don’t know how I forgot.”

“I-I,” Jimmy stutters. “But? It can’t happen that fast. We _just_ …”

“I have a feeling it wasn’t from just now,” Darcy theorizes. “I think it was last night.”

“That’s less than twenty-four hours extra! That’s not possible.”

“AND YET!” she yelps.

Helpfully, this seems to snap him out of his own shock enough to assist with hers. He takes Darcy’s hands, leaning in to catch her eye. She’s really just trying to breathe and focusing on his face makes it easier.

“The Hex did this,” he states.

She can agree with that much, so she nods.

“And it wasn’t… accelerating anything that was already happening?”

“I definitely was not pregnant,” Darcy assures him. “I haven’t even thought about hooking up since everyone was brought back. That was a few weeks ago and before that…” She stares at the ceiling, thinking and scrunching her mouth up. “It’s been a minute since I was seeing anyone. I was deep in my research before Hayward brought me out here. And I’m not an idiot—I always use multiple forms of protection.” She cocks her head as she adds dryly, “Except with you.”

“Last night.” Jimmy studies her hands as he runs his thumbs over them. “That’s when the influence felt the most intense. For you too, right?”

“Yep.”

“Maybe this was the goal. The Hex was orchestrating a baby boom.”

“You think this happened to other people?”

He shrugs and says, “We can ask Monica if she ever comes by.” He reaches to grab a watch off his nightstand, checking the hour as he fastens it around his wrist. “Which could be any time. It’s getting late. The talent show’s probably over.”

“We should get dressed then,” Darcy says stiffly, smoothing the folds out of the sheet that’s draped across her lap.

Her tone must worry Jimmy because he grabs her hands again.

“It’ll be ok,” he promises. “I’ll make sure you’re ok. We’ll find a good doctor and you’ll have options.”

The expression on his face is almost painfully tender and Darcy reads between the lines of what he just said. She opens her mouth to immediately agree with all that _options_ implies, but then she makes herself sit with it for a minute.

Sometime during the Blip, she stopped trying to picture what her life was going to look like. She could only take steps—enroll in school, finish one year and then the next. Graduate. Try not to lose herself in the endless possibilities of her research on interdimensional and interplanetary portals. Her relationships weren’t serious because _nothing_ seemed as serious as what had happened to Earth and the rest of the universe, and what Darcy could potentially do to study it. The clearest goal she had was for her research to maybe be utilized to establish a network between the places decimated by Thanos. To provide hope and contact across all that darkness. She wanted to use her life, spared by chance, to connect people (and aliens), and that’s what she concentrated on: secure connections between worlds, not between herself and a potential partner.

She looks at Jimmy, holding her hands safely in his.

“I like kids,” she says.

“I like kids too.”

“So I know I need to think about this some more—” She frees one of her hands to gesture to her belly. “—but I know I could do a lot worse than you for a father for my kid, Jimmy.”

“A father.”

“That’s right,” Darcy tells his stunned face. “Keep it together, dude.”

She claps him on the shoulder and climbs out of bed feeling better, like the touch transferred her overwhelmed feelings to Jimmy. Finding her glasses and gathering up her clothes, she manages to smile.

“Hey,” she notes, “by the looks of it, I’m past the pukiest months!”

“That’s great.”

Darcy’s stomach abruptly heaves because the Hex is a _dick_.

“Spoke too soon,” she says, bolting for the en suite bathroom.

Jimmy wants to be all sweet, probably hold her hair for her, but she waves him off. She doesn’t want company while she barfs. He brings her shirt in from the living room and leaves it on the counter before backing reluctantly away again, closing the door after himself. The solitude of the bathroom is nice for processing this detour in a post-Snap life that was supposed to be devoted to science. Because that would’ve been supremely fucking noble. Well, doesn’t she just have it all now? A doctorate _and_ impending motherhood _and_ a doting… whatever exactly Jimmy is to her. It’s a snide thought that Darcy has before pulling herself up, brushing her teeth, and dressing. Always so thoughtful, the Hex appears to have adjusted her clothes to accommodate her new baby bump. She rolls her eyes at her reflection in the bathroom mirror.

Her partner-in-more-ways-than-one appears to be respecting her request for space; the bedroom’s empty when she returns. No longer feeling ill, she decides to strip the bedding because, first, she enjoys the tedium of the straightforward task and, second... they need clean sheets after today’s marathon. She stuffs everything into a laundry basket and is heading to the linen closet when she hears voices from the front of the house.

Darcy walks to the living room, where Jimmy’s talking to Monica. _Oh good_ , she thinks, shoulders dropping, _something to be relieved about instead of more rattled_.

“…and it was all _for the children_ ,” Monica says with a laugh. “Don’t ask me which children or why they need help. It wasn’t clear.” She must hear Darcy shuffling in because she turns. Her eyebrows go up as her gaze goes down to the swell of Darcy’s stomach. “Um, speaking of children… _what_?”

“Oh yeah,” Darcy acknowledges. “Guess who got magically knocked up? Well, no, don’t guess. It’s pretty obvious.”

Monica looks very disturbed as she slowly approaches.

“The Hex did this?”

“Technically, Jimmy did this. Up top,” Darcy says, raising her hand in Jimmy’s direction for a high five that he denies her, shaking his head and visibly trying not to laugh.

“But the Hex…” Monica starts again.

“Accelerated the process,” Jimmy says, coming over to Darcy so he can face Monica. “That’s what we’re figuring. I was just going to ask you if you saw anything else of this nature at the event this evening.”

“Did I see anybody suddenly become pregnant? No. I didn’t even see anybody already pregnant.”

“Were you considering them as yourself or as Geraldine though?” Darcy asks carefully. “Because we sort of lost you earlier when we dropped you at Dottie’s and maybe your _WandaVision_ character would just turn a blind eye to that kind of weirdness.”

Monica frowns and shakes her head.

“No, I’m still… I’m still _me_ inside,” she explains, tapping her chest, “I just don’t have control of my words or actions. When I’m close to other people—other _characters_ —that’s when I lose agency.” She pauses. “Even if I couldn’t do or say anything about it at the time, I would remember seeing that happen.” She nods towards Darcy’s belly.

“So, nothing strange happened?” Jimmy asks.

“Oh, I didn’t say that,” Monica clarifies.

Darcy’s eyes widen as Monica summarizes the talent show, covering the first bunch of acts quickly before explaining Wanda and Vision’s magic show in detail. She glances at Jimmy, who looks a little bummed to have missed it; she almost reminds him of what he was doing instead, but she doesn’t want to make Monica uncomfortable.

The tricks performed by Westview’s sweethearts sound like they grew progressively riskier, but Darcy can still hardly believe it when Monica says the finale was her being magicked into the back of some cabinet.

“Wanda used her magic to teleport you?” she asks.

“Apparently. It’s not like she wasn’t using it on me already,” Monica points out. “Still, even _Geraldine_ was alarmed—” She scrunches her face as she refers to herself (who’s kinda not herself) in third person. “—and asked Vision and Wanda for answers. I’m sure Wanda didn’t intend for that to happen, but she either doesn’t have the same level of control over Vision as she has over the rest of us or she doesn’t want to exert it.”

“Wow.”

“Are weaknesses in Wanda’s control over this place a good thing or a bad thing?” Jimmy asks.

Darcy and Monica look at each other. Evidently, neither of them has an answer to that.

“I guess I should offer my congratulations,” Monica finally says.

Darcy puts a hand on her stomach, which is rapidly feeling less extraordinary. The Hex has to be fucking with her head.

“The only thing this place was missing was a radioactive baby,” she says cheerfully. At the look on Jimmy’s face, she adds, “I’m kidding.”

Really, she’s not. She doesn’t know what a baby conceived between the walls of the Hex will be like. Clearly, it’s fully under the influence of this place, growing so quickly. She’s also quickly becoming attached.

When no one knows what to say to her comment, the Hex intervenes to provide a talking point: starting with the walls, the shades of grey transform into colour. Darcy spins to watch colours spread down the hall, painting the floor and walls, and Jimmy’s arm comes out, tucking her behind him. She can’t blame him. Their surroundings were starting to seem normal and now everything’s different. Anticipating other, more sinister alterations is reasonable.

Once everything in the room has moved on from greyscale—including the three of them—Darcy gently breaks away from Jimmy’s hold and wanders down the hallway. Jimmy and Monica follow. She sticks her head into the bathroom, flips the light on, and goes, “I _knew_ our bathroom would be hideous. Didn’t I say that?”

“I wouldn’t be too concerned,” Monica says. “If yesterday was the fifties, we’ll be in the seventies tomorrow and it’ll all change again.”

Darcy feels Jimmy’s warm hand on her back as they continue to stare into the orange-and-brown bathroom.

“Is that supposed to be reassuring?” he asks.

“Reassuring or not,” Monica tells him, “it really just _is_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Congrats to everyone who saw Darcy's pregnancy coming lol One final chapter of this fic as we move into colour, the '70s, and the end of our trio's time in Westview!


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _Watch her take me by surprise/When she lets me call her mine/Do you ever really know?/Can you ever really know?_ \- "Woman," Mumford & Sons

Jimmy’s going to be a dad. He was going to be a dad in a black-and-white sitcom world and now he’s going to be a dad in a world on the regular spectrum, so the colours really aren’t as big a deal as his impending fatherhood. Possible fatherhood. As much as he’s always secretly wanted his own little Jimmy Woo Jr., he didn’t know if it would be in the cards for him—pun obviously intended—and the last thing he wants to do is influence Darcy either way, especially since he’s only known her a couple days and doesn’t have a clue if a baby was really part of her life plan.

It can’t just be rose-coloured glasses making him see his wife warming to the idea though; when she continues down the hall ahead of Jimmy and Monica, he spots her careful cradling of the baby bump. He can barely stand not touching her. The instinct to shelter others has always been one of his strongest and now he feels it intensely. He longs to protect Darcy, to hold Darcy, to love— Well. Jimmy clears his throat at the very thought and Monica gives him a suspicious side-eyed glance.

“Dry throat,” he lies, tapping his neck in a probably highly unconvincing gesture.

“Uh huh.”

Yeah, she doesn’t sound convinced.

He’s rescued by a burst of sound from the bedroom and dashes ahead of Monica in case Darcy’s in trouble. When he bangs the bedroom door fully open, she’s fine. She’s laughing. He sighs and looks where she points. The queen-sized mattress they shared has changed back to a pair of narrower beds.

“Seriously,” Jimmy says flatly.

“Well, the big bed worked its magic,” Darcy concedes. She pats her rounded stomach. “Mission accomplished.”

“Aw jeeze.”

Ignoring his distress, she sits on the end of the closest bed.

“What I like is that they’re magically made. I didn’t end up having to change the sheets. This is really the next step in home technology.”

“Honey, don’t encourage the magical forces that control our home décor,” he pleads, beckoning until Darcy rises and takes his outstretched hand.

“Better than getting on their bad side. In the AI uprising, you wanna make sure you’re friends with the robots.”

This is an outrageous statement coming from a credible scientist, so Jimmy squints down at her for a minute before saying, “Thanks, house,” aloud, just in case appeasing the Hex now saves him from being closed into a room with no door later, if the walls rearrange to form the ’70s model of their current home.

“You did the smart thing,” Darcy assures him.

As they leave the room, she keeps hold of his hand. He shoots adoring glances at her.

“Hey, Monica,” she says, calling to their guest, who seems to have gone to investigate the walk-in closet. “Accommodations aren’t going to be a problem. I can give you some pajamas too because I think I own at least a dozen pairs, as I’m sure you’ve already discovered…”

But when they look in the closet it’s… not a closet.

“Or maybe the Hex destroyed all my pajamas and I should take back my overtures of friendship,” Darcy corrects.

“Welcome to your nursery,” Monica says. “I’m guessing from the look on Jimmy’s face that this is new.”

It’s spartan, but there’s no doubt in Jimmy’s mind that the room is now intended to be exactly what Monica said. There’s a crib in pieces on the carpet and a rocking chair in the corner. Though he can’t remember this room having even one window, there are now two. The blinds are drawn against the night and curtains patterned with stars and streaking comets hang from a rod mounted above the window. Automatically, he pulls Darcy into his side. He feels her rest her head on his shoulder.

“Man, the Hex is really giving us the hard sell,” she comments.

Just like that, he’s guiding her around by her upper arms and propelling her from the room. He glances over his shoulder to see Monica following with an amused smile. At his nod, she pulls the door shut.

“Ignore it,” Jimmy tells Darcy. “Don’t let that room influence you.”

“Oh, like that’s easy.” She rolls her eyes.

“I know it’s hard not to picture reading Jimmy Junior to sleep in his crib, or watching him learn to roll himself over on the carpet, or cuddling him in your arms in the rocking chair as the morning light—”

“Jimmy Junior?” Darcy asks, interrupting Jimmy’s rapidly solidifying daydream.

“You know what? I’m starving,” Monica announces, putting a hand on each of their shoulders to head off the awkward pause. “How about you two show me some hospitality? I’ve had a long day of being mind-controlled.”

“How ’bout some comfort food?” he asks. “I make a mean bowl of chili.”

“Sounds great.”

So, Jimmy cooks for them. His attention is unequally divided between the simmering pot, Monica leaning against the counter next to him as she recounts the scene at the meeting when Wanda went to take his call, and Darcy sifting pickily through the contents of their fridge. He glances over after putting the lid on the pot to let the chili finish cooking and sees his wife contemplatively holding an egg like it’s Yorick’s skull. Ok, well, he’s just going to leave her to her thoughts.

He sets bowls of chili for himself and Monica on the dining room table. Darcy, justifiably finnicky, takes longer to decide what she’ll be able to stomach, reflexively rubbing the baby bump as she plunders their kitchen. Finally, she comes to sit down. She’s brought a spoon. That’s it. Jimmy’s going to ask, but Darcy just scoots her chair close to his and takes intermittent mouthfuls of _his_ serving while the conversation continues on. He sighs in unannoyed exasperation and alternates dips of his spoon with hers.

It’s just another weird routine they’ve settled into, and like everything else, it didn’t take long.

“You two didn’t know each other before this assignment, right?” Monica checks, motioning between Darcy and Jimmy with a slice of buttered toast.

“No, why?” Darcy asks, dropping a chunk of tomato from her spoon onto his. (Apparently, she doesn’t like tomatoes.)

Monica smiles and says, “No reason.”

She seems ready to accept them as they are, whatever they are. She goes back over the events of this afternoon for Darcy’s benefit—who was zoned out staring at an egg at the time—then the three of them turn to talk of tomorrow. What does Monica feel she needs to try before she’s willing to concede and leave the Hex with them? What _can_ she try? How can Jimmy and Darcy assist her? They talk themselves in a circle of possibilities, limitations, and Monica’s unswerving negative answer to suggestions of her leaving the Hex without getting through to Wanda. Eventually, they decide that the best plan may be no plan, since they’re up against Westview’s ever-shifting magical properties.

“We’ll get up in the morning and see what the world looks like,” Monica says.

Jimmy’s going to reply when the Captain’s expression alters.

“Are you remembering?” Darcy asks her astutely. Monica stares at her. “I don’t want to pry, I’ve just seen that look on a lot of people’s faces lately. People who came back.”

“This isn’t dissimilar,” Monica admits. “When I get anywhere near Wanda or the other characters with speaking parts and start to lose control to… Geraldine—” Jimmy thinks the look on her face is both disgusted and deeply hurt. “—I do get this feeling like the world is going on without me. Only I’m there. I’m right _there_. I haven’t made up my mind yet if it’s worse than being gone entirely then coming back to find nothing’s the same.”

“Yeah,” Darcy says, soft, sympathetic.

“I don’t know what else the members of this community have been through, but I know I don’t want them to have to keep going through this too. I can’t imagine how tight Wanda’s grip is on the people who were here when she started this. Not sure I’m qualified to be the one to tell her how to let go of her grief and move on.”

Monica blinks quickly and gives a forced smile.

“That was good chili, Jimmy.”

He nods in thanks because he can’t find the right words to say.

They’re all carrying something and Jimmy thinks about that as the three of them clean up, then splinter off to get ready for bed, tired for different and shared reasons. (He changes into his pajamas in the nursery—they found their clothing in a new, regular-sized closet in the bedroom—while Monica and Darcy take the bathrooms.) The Captain’s carrying her recent bereavement and the unignorable sense of responsibility she feels to help Wanda and the Westviewers, possibly precisely because she isn’t ready to confront her own loss. Darcy’s doing some literal carrying with the baby bump her pajama top is buttoned over when she steps out of the en suite bathroom to let Jimmy in to brush his teeth. She’s an astrophysicist who, while studying a television diversion from reality, was brought rudely back to earth by circumstances as real as they come.

What Jimmy’s carrying is actually carrying him: his hope. It’s a good thing to have in his line of work, but a tough thing to keep when the world’s been through what it has. A baby is the least likely and most longed-for thing he would’ve confessed to wanting if someone asked him what was missing from his life.

When it’s acknowledged through awkward glances that, yes, Monica’s taking one of the beds and Jimmy and Darcy will share the other, he climbs under the covers his wife holds open for him. She rolls away from him to lie on her side and he gets comfortable on his back. The Hex has definitely eased up on what it wants for their romantic development because this is the first time he’s been in bed with Darcy and not felt himself caving to the need to have sex with her. Oh, the desire to touch her is as powerful as ever, but the kind of touching he craves is as tender as the flesh of that peach he brought her earlier in the day.

But he doesn’t want to crowd her. Figuratively or literally. Between finding Monica and calling Wanda, making love to Darcy all afternoon and being presented with her pregnant belly in the evening, it’s been a dog’s breakfast of a day. The mission abruptly became just the second most daunting thing he needs to pull off. Now, he’s driven by the impulse to be near Darcy. She doesn’t know it, but she’s drawing him in like gravity and he can only cross his fingers for a soft landing.

Jimmy almost jumps when she reaches for him in the dark, hand feeling behind her until it finds his. She drags his arm over her and he flips onto his side to make it easier. Though Darcy lets him go when his arm’s around her, he doesn’t know where to rest his hand. Tentatively, he places it over her belly and she wriggles back into him. Heart bursting, he holds her more securely to his body, smooths his hand over the bump, and soon falls asleep.

* * *

The floor wakes him up. He’s just fallen out of bed.

Disoriented, Jimmy sits up in a tangle of comforter and squints at his bed companion in the morning light. They must’ve repositioned while they slept, but that alone wasn’t what forced him to and over the edge—he can see the shape of Darcy’s belly beneath the sheet. It’s noticeably larger than it was yesterday.

He’s still trying to come to terms with that when she sleepily grasps the comforter and yanks it back over her body. Jimmy chuckles and rises into a stretch. Monica’s bed is empty and neatly made, so she must be up already. Before entering the Hex, his internal clock was strict too. Since, he bends to the needs of his subconscious, which seems happiest when it’s allowed to sleep in, particularly if Darcy’s warming the sheets next to him. This is only their third day in Westview and the second time waking up here, but it feels wonderfully routine. As satisfying as completing his consistently-timed morning run or pouring exactly the right amount of milk into his cereal.

Although he’d like to let Darcy sleep, it’s weird now because he’s staring. Anyway, they need to tighten up their operations even further today if they’re going to get out of here soon. Monica requires either success or closure with Wanda, so Jimmy’s determined to help with that. And if Darcy’s pregnancy takes another leap forward, well… that’s another time crunch to consider.

She’s lying on her side, facing him, belly in the space where he fell asleep. Gently, he brushes hair out of her face and strokes lightly up and down her arm.

Darcy gives him a murmured “Hi” with her eyes still shut.

“You gonna get up?”

“ _Inaminute_ ,” she promises, words running together.

“Alright.”

Jimmy hovers for a second, then darts down to kiss her forehead. She pats his shoulder clumsily in response.

He might as well have had his own eyes shut, blind to everything but Darcy, because it takes opening his wardrobe to realize Monica was correct—everything’s changed again. _WandaVision_ has embraced the ’70s. The shirts and suits he was pretty comfortable with have been traded out. Those items still exist, but now they’re aggressively patterned. There are flared pant legs. There is so much corduroy. Out of the row of shoes tucked into the bottom on his side of the closet, half have platform heels.

“Oh god,” Jimmy groans softly, sifting through for something that won’t feel too much like a cheesy costume.

He ends up with jeans—his only pair of pants without a pattern—and a striped shirt with wide lapels. The Hex’s makeover of his closet has him so beaten down that he doesn’t even pick out a jacket. He doesn’t have the heart for business casual. At the sight of a long-sleeved jumpsuit, Jimmy closes the closet door securely. They have to get out of here. This will be the thing that breaks him.

Slouching into the bathroom, he drops his selections on the counter and takes a shower. As he washes his hair, his fingers slow their scrubbing. Is his hair… longer? He finishes quickly and steps out to find the mirror fogged with steam. He wipes it clean with his forearm, examining his reflection. This place isn’t through with him yet: the Hex has given him a mustache.

Jimmy screams.

“Fine!” Darcy shouts back to his wordless noise of dismay. “I’m up! God, you could’ve just set an alarm and OH MY GOD, HAVE YOU SEEN THE SIZE OF THIS BABY BUMP?!”

He sighs on behalf of himself and his wife, slicks his too-long wet hair back with a comb, then starts in on shaving off the mustache. It immediately grows back.

“Come on,” he complains, cursing the Hex. “Why’d you give me a razor then?!”

Luckily, his annoyance fades the minute he sees Darcy. She’s swearing up a storm about needing to pee and her head looking too small for her body because the Hex has straightened her hair, but he takes all of her restless irritation in with a dazed smile on his face. Adjusting her glasses—now almost circular, with rounded off corners—she catches sight of his new look and erupts into laughter. Whatever the Hex does to mess with their appearance, at least they’re each other’s best medicine to combat it.

“I don’t want to be insensitive,” Monica starts when they walk into the kitchen hand in hand, “but are you significantly more pregnant than you were yesterday?”

Jimmy watches Darcy nod and slips away from her to throw some more bread in the toaster from the bag Monica’s left out on the counter for them.

“You’d think it’s just this big, shapeless dress,” Darcy says, “but no.” She pulls the fabric taut over her stomach to show the size of her belly more accurately. “I don’t want to say it, but the size of this thing makes me think the Hex is leaving me room to grow.”

“And if that dress is only for today…” Monica says.

“Jeepers,” Jimmy concludes.

They eat together in their reconfigured living room. It’s not until Monica’s kicked back in one of their low chairs, ankle propped on her opposite knee, that Jimmy notices her patterned pants.

“Those aren’t from Darcy’s closet are they?”

“No. I’m assuming they’re my clothes from yesterday with the matter recycled for a new decade. Believe me, this outfit wouldn’t have been my choice if I had anything else to pick from.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure. I had a whole closet and still ended up with this,” Jimmy says, motioning to himself.

“My retro Secret Agent Man,” Darcy states admiringly, leaning her head over to bump against his shoulder. _Ok_ , he thinks, smiling at her, _I can be alright with this for her_.

When Monica rises to turn on the television, Jimmy realizes this is the first time they’ve had one in the house. He remembers seeing a set in the Vision residence when he and Darcy were watching an episode on the S.W.O.R.D. base, but he didn’t notice the lack once they got here. Probably because that first night was taken up with flirting, and then yesterday was split between scouring the downtown for Monica and holing up in the bedroom with Darcy. Watching the screen buzz to life now is like witnessing something truly futuristic and spectacular.

“Well, whaddaya know,” he says as the opening sequence of _WandaVision_ begins.

“You think the TVs in here play anything else?” Darcy wonders aloud.

“Maybe not,” Monica says distractedly as they all turn their attention to Wanda and Vision’s adorable antics—the ice cream, the tandem bicycle. “It’s a pretty big coincidence that this show started right when I turned it on.”

“I can see an even bigger coincidence.”

There’s no need to guess what Darcy means. Wanda’s baby bump is obvious in nearly every shot of the introduction, particularly emphasized when she and Vision dance together, his hand on her belly. It’s all maternity clothes and Vision reading pregnancy books and while it’s wholesome, it’s also chilling.

“We’re doing the same plot,” Jimmy says.

“It’s like we’re… their understudies,” Darcy agrees, shrinking back into the cushions.

“Maybe Wanda figured, if you two wanted to be in the show so bad, she’d put you in the show,” Monica theorizes. “Her show. Exactly the way she’s living it.”

“So she’s teaching us a lesson? On what? Abstinence?”

“Could be a misguided attempt to gain your sympathy.”

“Or it really is all about control,” Jimmy suggests, cynical after the reveal that the pregnancy that’s upended his entire life isn’t really _theirs_. It’s not original. They’re following a Newlywed Couple template.

“Hey,” Darcy says, grabbing his arm, “this wasn’t all Wanda. She might’ve set the scene and, yeah, maybe we were more the goatherd puppets than we were Fraulein Maria and Captain von Trapp, but _we_ did this.” She pulls his hand to her belly. “Wanda doesn’t decide what we do next.”

“What I suggest you _not_ do next is consult Dr. Misogyny over here,” Monica says, gesturing at the television.

The doctor is condescending to Wanda and Vision about the facts of life during a checkup (in their living room?). He lowers himself even further in Jimmy’s regard when he refers to expectant mothers as “little ladies” and implies that the changes in their own bodies are beyond their understanding.

“What a quack,” he decides. “We’re not going to see _that_ guy.” He’s startled to recall his promise to Darcy the previous evening, about options, his intention not to make up her own mind for her. Lowering his voice, he tilts his head close to hers. “I mean, we’ll do whatever you want. Including…”

Jimmy trails off and casts his eyes down. He still means it, wants Darcy on board with this 100% or not at all, but the whole thing’s been a roller coaster and he’s not great at pretending not to feel anything. With his wife so much further into her pregnancy today, it’s obvious that this baby will be born and they’ll need to decide who’s raising it. He thinks the two of them together could rear a pretty incredible kid, but if she wants out, is he prepared to be a single parent? The other option besides her, him, or both of them raising the baby is adoption. They’d need to leave the Hex before taking those steps (it’s not like he’s going to encourage Darcy to hand the baby over to a mind-controlled Westviewer), and just thinking about it, with everything he already feels for the baby, makes him certain that he’d rather rearrange his entire life than pass on this chance at a family. However unorthodox their beginnings.

“Don’t worry,” Darcy says calmly, pulling him from his spiral. “That guy will never get the chance to compare my uterus to a vegetable garden.”

“Fruit,” Monica corrects without looking away from the television.

“Right. Fruit. He’ll have no say about any of it. And he definitely won’t get the opportunity to be patronizing as fuck while he tries to give us the sex talk.” She looks Jimmy right in the eye and says, “I won’t let the asshole doctor-man say a word about your banana.”

Chuckling, he looks back to the screen. The doctor has departed and Vision’s currently baffled over Wanda’s newly expanded stomach. Uh oh. He jerks his head around to check and, yep, Darcy’s baby bump appears to be keeping up with the sitcom star’s.

“You two stay here,” Monica instructs, on her feet when Jimmy glances over.

“Where are you going?” he asks.

“To Wanda’s. If things continue at this rate, she could give birth in this episode. That’s going to make her even more protective of her family and her space and I’ll have an even harder time getting near her.”

“Are you sure you want to interrupt?”

They both glance at the television for a moment to observe Wanda and Vision debating baby names in the nursery. There’s nothing distressing about the scene—in fact, the couple looks as much at ease as Jimmy’s seen them on the show—but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t change, and quickly, if Monica inserted herself. He just isn’t sure how that would go and he doesn’t like any plan where he can’t foresee all the possible outcomes.

“Guess I just have a feeling,” Monica says, looking unsettled.

“Well,” Darcy pipes up, “in the world of science, having a feeling is forming a theory, and in this place… I think having a feeling you should do something might be Wanda giving you your cue.”

“You’re not beyond her control,” Jimmy tells Monica, “just farther away from it. What if Darcy’s right?”

“If Wanda wants me there, I’m not going to resist,” she replies firmly. “She’s the key and we need her cooperation.”

“Good luck,” Darcy bids her.

With a nod to them both, Monica strides across the living room and opens the front door.

“Speaking of keys,” Jimmy recalls, but the door shuts before he can offer to let her borrow their car to get to Wanda’s.

Maybe the Captain has a different plan. Maybe she’s just bending to Wanda’s influence. Whichever it is, he can’t go after her. Monica was right—he has to stay here with Darcy today, especially because her belly seems larger when he looks again. He glances at her face with a question on his and she nods.

“And I felt a kick,” she says.

“Really? Could I…? Do you think I could…?”

Darcy rolls her eyes at his reticence and guides both his hands to the bump. When he feels something nudge his palm, Jimmy tears up.

“That’s our baby,” Darcy confirms.

“Feels like they have my softball windup,” he murmurs.

“Or my pre-coffee restlessness.”

“Our baby,” Jimmy repeats, staring into her eyes—finally blue for the first time in days, give or take a decade.

They’re having a marvelous family moment until the power goes out. Lights, TV, the hum of the fridge in the kitchen, everything. Seconds later, it all comes back.

“That was strange.”

“I wondered what Wanda’s magic was doing to the power grid,” Darcy says. “I’m still curious about the finer points of what happens when electricity meets power generated by an Infinity Stone. Really, I’d expect Wanda to have this kinda thing under control, but I guess if she’s— _Ugh_!”

Her pained noise has Jimmy cupping her face, pushing back her hair, trying to figure out what happened.

“She’s distracted,” she says.

“By what?”

“Labour.”

“What? No.”

Sure enough, when Darcy stands (with Jimmy leaping to his feet to support her) and stretches her back, her bump looks big enough to contain a baby that’s almost ready to be born. _Ready to be born?!_ Jimmy thinks. _In our house? With no doctor?_ Just because the one on TV rubbed him the wrong way doesn’t mean he’s prepared to write off every doctor, nurse, and midwife in Westview. He would very much like to place responsibility for this delivery in the hands of a medical professional, not his own!

Even as the TV’s flickering back to life, he helps Darcy away from it. That just shows how serious things are. He knows how quickly she became invested in the sitcom when they reviewed the ’50s episode at the base.

After some frantic thought, he’s thinking the bathtub is going to have to do. People do that right? With home births? Although he attempts to guide Darcy in that direction, she doesn’t even want to sit down on the edge, let alone climb in. No, she wants to pace, and as she paces, she rubs at her lower back, wincing.

“We could look at the nursery,” he proposes. “Might take your mind off it.”

Jimmy knows it could be a weak suggestion, an insult to imply that anything could take Darcy’s mind off whatever discomfort she’s currently feeling, but the Hex, with its radioactive walls, smiles down on them for once. With his arm around her to take some of her weight, they hobble into the baby’s room and it’s… perfect.

The walls are dark blue near the ceiling, almost black, fading to periwinkle halfway down the wall. The lower portion transitions from blue to pale yellow, then a blazing orange right before the baseboard.

“It’s a sunrise,” he comprehends.

“Yeah,” Darcy says softly.

Though he feels like he got slightly ripped off by not being allowed a chance to do any of the decorating, he does admire the Hex’s choices. At last, his wife’s been represented in this space, in this house, and it’s beautiful. There’s a shelf full of space-themed board books, a plastic jumble of play versions of scientific tools like telescopes. A dangling mobile of the planets. After easing his wife into the rocking chair, Jimmy holds up a pack of glow-in-the-dark stars.

“Should I put these up?”

She smiles.

“I would be all over that shit if I could, but I trust you to do a good job.”

“Oh no. Do you want me to do real constellations?”

“The baby’s not gonna know the difference. Make it look however you want.”

She rocks, assuring him something about the motion is helping her manage the intensifying pain of her contractions, and Jimmy finds a small stepping stool to help him reach the ceiling. The sway of the chair in the corner of his eye, the morning light through the curtains, and the sound of Darcy breathing are things he already knows he’ll never forget.

Before he’s stuck all the stars in the pack to the ceiling’s white paint, she calls him down from the stool.

“I need to walk again.”

Darcy says it with grit and Jimmy doesn’t argue, even when walking appears to put her in even more distress; she groans and pushes her free hand against the wall as they stroll out of the nursery and down the hallway.

“Let’s check in with Wanda,” Jimmy says helplessly.

This is who he is now: a husband in over his head, desperate to gain tips about delivering a baby from a TV sitcom. An overwhelmed real estate agent. A man with a mustache.

They return to the living room and the TV playing _WandaVision_ in time for Monica’s entrance. Based on her free use of ’70s slang and the general discord between the Captain Rambeau Jimmy’s been getting to know and the woman on the screen, he knows they’re looking at Geraldine. Wanda’s back in control of her character alright, and Jimmy wants to know who it’s helping. The scene’s centered around some joke about Wanda attempting to hide her pregnancy, which is no good for him. He needs a step-by-step guide, not a magic-resistant stork!

“There better not be a fucking bird in here,” Darcy gripes, alternately crouching and standing as every position fails to make her comfortable. “If I see a fucking, goddamn, sonofabitch, motherfucking—”

“I know, sweetie, I know,” Jimmy assures her, rubbing circles between her shoulder blades with the flat of his hand.

“The betrayal,” she mutters when Wanda elects to lie down behind a couch.

It completely blocks their view. If this were a regular show, Jimmy would understand that. Sitcom viewers would definitely appreciate a little TV magic over graphic, up-close-and-personal birth footage, but here at the Woo residence, one FBI agent and his astrophysicist wife really just want the truth! If Monica had agency, he’s sure she’d shove the couch aside to help them out, but with Geraldine at the helm, he’s confronting the fact that he and Darcy are on their own.

“Let’s go, Darcy,” he says, steering her towards the bathroom. “We don’t need her.”

“Are you sure?”

He’s never heard Darcy sound so uncertain and knows he’ll have to bluff his way through this. When the Avengers aren’t around, the regular people must step up. Reminding himself of that has gotten Jimmy through more than one tough day on the job and he tells himself it’ll get them both through this.

“Of course.”

In the bathroom, Darcy kicks out of her underwear and uses Jimmy as a crutch to climb into the tub. Her face is scrunched up severely and her hands are braced against the walls of the bathtub, so he tries to watch and understand what she needs. When all the tension in her face and body burst out in a shout, he grabs her hand. Her fingers curl around his palm in a death grip.

“How about some nice warm water? Water, Darcy?”

She nods rapidly, eyes clenched shut, and he turns on the facet, then quickly reaches behind her to plug the drain. The stream wets his sleeve and, when he withdraws his arm, hits her hair around the level of her shoulders and begins to soak the back of her dress. Between contractions, Darcy sighs in what sounds like relief.

“That feels good,” she acknowledges.

“Good,” is all Jimmy can say back. He kisses her face and squeezes her hand in his. “Good.”

He’s back to scrambling for a solution soon enough when the warm flow of water down her back stops being enough to soothe her. He helps her out of her sodden dress, tossing it behind him to splat on the tile floor.

“What do you need?” he asks wildly, leaning over the tub.

“Earplugs,” Darcy tells him before emitting a scream shrill enough to probably be heard by their neighbour’s dog, Dipper, down the street.

Jimmy doesn’t think, he just does. Snatching a towel off the rail, bracing his wife’s foot against his shoulder as her leg spasms, reaching into the water to collect their baby when the Hex (he assumes) does them the favour of letting one long push be sufficient to expel him. _Him_. Jimmy and Darcy’s son.

He’s beaming through the happy tears, delicately wiping at the wailing baby with the towel and passing him into Darcy’s outstretched arms as she shakes with astonished laughter, hair wet, head resting back against the jut of the faucet.

“That wasn’t so hard,” he jokes.

Darcy sits up, sending a splash of water over the side of the bathtub to slap the floor, and he knows the Hex is interfering again to make her capable of anything besides exhaustion after what she just accomplished. She twists sideways in the tub until she’s closer to Jimmy. He wraps an arm around her wet shoulders and peers down at the face of their boy, already drowsy after exercising his tiny lungs. Jimmy can feel Darcy studying his face.

“Jimmy Woo Junior?” she asks.

And he knows the rest is going to be gravy.

* * *

Inside the Hex, the magic of television is real. They didn’t need to fake Darcy’s pregnancy with a cushion to make her belly, round and taut as a beach ball, disappear entirely only minutes after giving birth. They didn’t need a set of twins or triplets playing Jimmy Woo Jr. to swap in a quiet baby for one that starts to cry. There’s no trick lighting or fudged angles, just Darcy sitting on the couch (in dry, non-maternity clothes) catching their amazingly calm, less than an hour-old son up on the details of his origin story—Darcy’s wording.

It’s shaping up to be a nice, if highly unusual, family day in, until the tension starts to mount on-screen. Probably something Jimmy could’ve caught sooner if he weren’t spending 50 seconds out of every minute stroking the baby’s teeny-weeny hands while he hopes Jimmy Jr. retains zero memory of his dad’s mustache. When he hears Monica mention Wanda’s brother by name, he’s fully alert to the episode and knows he has to act. That close to Wanda, Monica’s control should be fully suppressed beneath the character of Geraldine. If she’s breaking through to ask Wanda person questions, questions that are almost definitely going to provoke an emotional response, Monica must be fighting like crazy to surface. Jimmy decides that’s his signal to get over there and help bring this thing to a satisfying conclusion so they can all leave the Hex.

“You’re not going to Wanda’s without me,” Darcy informs him, planted in front of the door when Jimmy returns from grabbing his keys.

“Darcy, you can’t. The baby. I’d stay with him and let you go, but I’ve never heard you mention particular skill in hand-to-hand combat and I can’t guarantee things won’t turn violent.”

She snorts.

“Liar. I could be the world’s biggest hand-to-hand badass and you’d still be trying to protect me right now.”

He stares at her and Darcy stubbornly lifts her chin as she holds his eyes.

“Ok,” Jimmy concedes, “yes, I would.”

“Please don’t leave us here,” she says, cheek pressed to the baby’s. No, no, no, he can already feel himself wanting to surrender, to have them with him. Darcy kisses their son’s face, then holds his hand to gesture while she pitches her voice higher, pretending to speak for Jimmy Jr. “I want to meet Auntie Monica.”

He gives her a look and reaches past her to open the door. Instead of trying to exit around his family, he waves Darcy through ahead of him. (She looks down at the baby in her arms and goes “Yaaaay! Isn’t Daddy a soft touch?”)

“You didn’t persuade me,” he says, leading them to the car and holding the door for Darcy while she climbs into the back seat with the baby. “This is strategic.”

“Is the strategy common sense? I feel like you should’ve gone with that from the beginning. Bringing a scientist to a magic fight is good thinking, for, like, balance and shit.”

Jimmy backs down the driveway as gently as he can. Their car’s been modernized (well, for the latest decade) and while it now has seatbelts, it wasn’t equipped with a car seat for their son. He’s going to have to drive with the utmost care.

“Hopefully, there won’t _be_ a fight,” he reminds Darcy, “but if there is, you won’t be anywhere near it. You and Jimmy Junior are staying in the car. Alright?”

When he darts his gaze to the rear-view mirror, he sees his wife looking out her window, making a show of not listening to him. Jimmy sighs.

Without thinking, he navigates back to the street where they dropped Monica off yesterday. Wanda’s house is just down from Dottie’s; he remembers the number from watching _WandaVision_. Jimmy draws up to the curb and parks. He glances back at Darcy, but she’s still ignoring him.

“I’ll try to be right back,” he tells her anyway, eyes dropping longingly to the serene face of his sleeping son. He’s heard that about babies and car rides.

Jogging up the driveway, he does a doubletake of a ragged slash in the wall between Wanda’s property and her neighbour’s. There’s not exactly anything wrong with a damaged cinderblock or an amateur handyman job, but the crevice in the stone stands out in a world so aggressively styled and manicured.

Wishing for the reassurance of his gun at his hip in case things go south (it’s the first time he’s even thought about the gun since the night he and Darcy arrived), Jimmy enters the Vision residence without knocking.

Orienting himself to what he was just watching on TV in a house less than a mile from here, he walks across the entryway, attracting the attention of both Wanda and Monica. They’re standing across from each other in the living room. Raising his hands to show he intends no harm, Jimmy sweeps his eyes over the scene in assessment, like he has a hundred times before. Monica’s expression is alarmed under superficial friendliness—the look of someone trying to placate an attacker. With her aggressive, forward-leaning posture and the way she’s positioned herself between Monica and the cribs (he’s surprised to see more than one, but he did miss some of the episode while he was delivering his son in their bathtub), Wanda fits that role.

“Wanda,” he says, taking a step towards the seating area, “you don’t want to hurt her.”

“Are you working with her?” Wanda demands. “Who are you? I’ve never seen you before.”

“James Woo. I’m not here to hurt you. Neither is Geraldine.”

“You don’t want to hurt me? Then why do you come asking questions? Saying things—” He can see her chin wobble from here as she teeters on the edge of tears. “—about Pietro. You didn’t know my brother.”

Her statement is directed at Monica, but Jimmy tries to bring her focus back to him. Of himself and the Captain, he’s the one with an exit at his back, whereas Monica’s hemmed in by a large bookcase.

“I didn’t know your brother,” Jimmy agrees. “I do know _about_ him, but we don’t need to talk about that. I don’t want to upset you, Wanda, I just want you to let me leave with Geraldine.”

“Oh, I’ll let you leave,” Wanda says, cocking her head as she raises her hands. This motion conveys the opposite meaning to Jimmy’s—she does intend them harm.

He’s contemplating what’ll happen if he tries to rush her when Darcy charges through the front door he left open.

“Don’t!” Jimmy gasps, making a grab for her, but his body is tense with caution and Darcy has the momentum to dodge him, stepping down the level into the living room.

“Look,” Darcy demands of Wanda, whose expression is torn as she chooses between facing Monica and this new intruder.

Jimmy’s mentally composing and rejecting ideas of how to proceed when their unwelcoming host lowers her hands. She’s looking where Darcy directed her to, at the baby in Darcy’s arms.

“He was born less than an hour ago, and I only found out I was pregnant yesterday, but that doesn’t matter. I know it’s the same for you, the circumstances and the… yeah, whatever. You know about the Big Bang, right?” she continues, jumping to the next thought.

“Yes,” Wanda says carefully.

Jimmy’s terrified to move closer and set Wanda on the offensive again. He glances at Monica, who seems to be thinking the same thing, frozen in place.

“From nothing to so much, in an instant,” Darcy’s saying in her condensed history of the universe. “Science is supposed to be full of all these rules. Like, every scientist dude important enough to remember had some law or formula or method that we map everything on top of when we’re pretending we understand all this. Being in science isn’t a goal I’ve had for a long time—I mean, I probably wouldn’t be in it now if the world hadn’t more or less ended—and if all I ever heard about the workings of the universe was rules, I would’ve stayed away. Who likes rules, right? Who wants to be told that things are the way they are because something outside of your control says so? My point is…”

She takes a deep breath, then another one, shifting until she’s blocking Wanda’s expression from Jimmy’s view.

“Sorry, I just gave birth, you know how it is,” Darcy says when she goes on. Jimmy’s stricken with exasperation, adoration, fear, and pride. “My point is that I love science because, while science _is_ laws and rules and equations, science is also standing outside at night and staring up at the dark. There are explanations for every light that’s up there and why, even when you’re away from big cities and the sky seems so black and close, you don’t fall up into it, although it kinda feels like you could. Science can tell me why, and it still feels like magic when I look at the stars. And we’ve all been traveling out here in space together, getting made and unmade and made again because the right ingredients needed to create something as precious as a planet, or a baby, or the clay that’ll make the bricks that’ll make the house never disappear. Suns explode, asteroids collide and get chipped away… things can separate down to their smallest part, life can…”

“End?” Wanda asks.

Jimmy’s stunned to hear the word come out choked. Cautiously, he leans to get a glimpse of Wanda’s face. It’s covered in tears. Darcy’s nodding.

“But everything’s valuable. All matter gets reused.” Jimmy wants to grab her and pull her to safety when she takes a step closer to Wanda. “I get it if you’re sad and you’re not ready to talk about it. I’m not gonna say it’s ok, because I’ve heard Monica’s testimonial on exactly how much it sucks to have you in her head, but I do think you should let us leave now so you have a few friends out there when you inevitably need people on your side.”

“You can go,” Wanda agrees, swiping at her nose. “I won’t hurt your baby.”

“You’re not going to hurt my friend either,” Darcy says, beckoning for Monica to cross the room behind her. “Or my husband.”

“No,” Wanda says.

Monica reaches Jimmy and they wait for Darcy in the entryway.

“I bet all that control feel really good,” Darcy theorizes. “Taking it into your own hands. But I think you know that focusing on the beautiful, magical stuff doesn’t mean the rules no longer exist. Maybe you can find a way to accept them both.”

“It’s time for you to leave,” Wanda says, firmer now.

“Not looking for a life coach, got it.”

She joins Jimmy and Monica, bouncing the baby lightly in her arms. Wanda ushers them out of the house ahead of her. Jimmy glances back to see her close the door after herself with a twist and red glow of her hands.

“What about waiting in the car?” he mutters to Darcy as they stride down the lawn.

His self-proclaimed wife stares at him.

“I’m not the kind of person who waits in the car. Would the kind of person who waits in the car give a speech like that?”

Jimmy’s at an honest-to-goodness loss for words.

She gets into the car willingly enough now, Jimmy in the passenger’s seat while Monica slides behind the wheel.

“Wanda’s told me how to stand, how to move, how to walk since I got in here,” Monica says, turning the key in the ignition. “I’m driving myself out.”

“It’ll part for you when you get there,” Wanda calls to them from the lawn. “The barrier. I suggest you do not attempt to enter again.”

“I think we’ve all had our fill,” Jimmy informs her cheerfully through his rolled-down window.

She doesn’t respond to this, so Monica executes a three-point turn and takes them back up the street the way they came. From there, they turn out of the subdivision, but Jimmy snags a last look at Wanda through the back window. There’s a light breeze blowing her dress and hair and she looks like she could be anyone. A suburban mom of twins? Why not. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever see her again in person, but he has plans to catch her show.

“Wanda’s changed the roads,” Monica says as she drives. For his son’s sake, Jimmy’s grateful that she isn’t speeding, though he wouldn’t blame her for trying to get out of here as quickly as possible. “None of them lead out of town.”

“Literal tourist trap. Brilliant,” Darcy declares from the back seat. Jimmy reaches an arm back blindly and feels her close her hand around his.

“But,” Monica adds, “I remember Ellis Avenue being the closest cross street to the edge of town. We find that, then drive over the grass. Things may get a little bumpy.”

“We’ll survive.”

Jimmy twists around to look at Darcy. He nods. They will. They’ll survive.

They cross Ellis and take the car off-road. The barrier remains invisible, but…

“I can feel it,” Darcy says.

“Like we did the day we came in,” Jimmy recalls.

“It still wants us out,” Monica interprets. He sees her staring uneasily ahead. “Was I naïve to think I could change anything by coming in here?”

“No, Captain. It was brave.”

“Didn’t work though. We aren’t leaving with Wanda.”

“It could work,” Darcy says. “We left her with a few things to think about. We’ll watch _WandaVision_ and see.”

“That’ll be strange after being a part of it.”

“You think so?” Jimmy wonders. He takes a deep breath, enjoying the fresh air and the sunshine, playing with Darcy’s fingers laced through his. “I think it’s returning to regular life that’s going to feel strange. Out there, it’s easy to see all this as a TV show, but everything in here is real.”

“We’ll make Hayward understand that.”

“I’m bringing back some compelling evidence,” Darcy says, followed by kissy sounds directed at Jimmy Jr.

The air just a couple of car lengths ahead of them abruptly glows red as Wanda reveals the wall of the Hex. Jimmy and Monica exchange a look, but she doesn’t slow down. They pass through without resistance. All of a sudden, it’s night. Monica lets out a relieved sigh.

The S.W.O.R.D. base is looming, exterior lights ablaze, but Jimmy looks backwards, checking that Darcy and the baby are alright.

“Same as you left us,” she says, pulling back the blanket to show him the face of his son.

He gives her a slightly melancholic smile.

“Not quite, Dr. Lewis.”

“I’ll have a lot of work to do,” Darcy notes thoughtfully, “but time for you and me to go on dates will be on my list of demands.”

“You have a list of demands?” Monica asks, laughter in her voice.

“After being forced into the Hex, where I could’ve lost my life? Fuck yes, I have a list.”

“What else are you asking for?”

“The coffee I requested on day one and a desk in a better spot so there’s room next to it for the crib that will _also_ be on my list.”

Monica laughs aloud now.

“Is this a benefits negotiation or a baby shower registry?”

“Let’s get back to the part where we’re going on dates,” Jimmy says. “How’s that going to work?”

“Jimmy, darlin’,” Darcy begins, “will you go out with me?”

He leans to look around his seat at her.

“Darcy, we were married. We _have_ a baby. Don’t you think we can—”

“Answer the question, Agent Woo.”

“Of course I’ll go out with you,” he says.

“And that’s how it works. Easy-peasy.”

She gives his hand a squeeze before releasing it to hold Jimmy Jr. more securely as Monica pulls up to a building and brakes. Already, S.W.O.R.D. agents are rushing out to meet them, but Jimmy drops back against his seat and smiles to himself.

“‘Easy-peasy.’”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Don't know if words can say/But, darlin', I'll find a way/To let you know what you meant to me/Guess it was meant to be_ \- "Darlin'," The Beach Boys
> 
> Thanks, everyone. You've been lovely.
> 
> The full Darcy & Jimmy soundtrack:  
>  **"This Time Tomorrow" - The Kinks** / "Sedona" - Houndmouth / **"Come Along" - Cosmo Sheldrake** / "The Lonely Goatherd" - Julie Andrews / **"Freak in Me" - Mild Orange** / "You Can't Hurry Love" - The Supremes / **"Will You Love Me Tomorrow" - The Shirelles** / "The Way You Look Tonight" - Frank Sinatra / **"You Really Got Me" - The Kinks** / "All Shook Up" - Elvis Presley / **"Stand by Your Man" - Tammy Wynette** / "Earth Angel" - The Vogues / **"I'm a Believer" - The Monkees** / "Can't Buy Me Love" - The Beatles / **"Darlin'" - The Beach Boys** / "You Go to My Head" - Frank Sinatra / **"July" - Far Caspian** / "Little of Your Love" - HAIM / **"Goodmorning" - Bleachers** / "Old Soul" - Saint Motel / **"Pancakes for Dinner" - Lizzy McAlpine** / "Woman" - Mumford & Sons


End file.
